Word order and the Minimalist Program: Data from Jordanian varieties

Abstract

This study compares the canonical word order of two varieties of Arabic ‒ Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Jordanian Non-Standard Arabic (NSA) ‒ from a minimalist perspective. There are differences between the two varieties in terms of constituent movement motivations and sequence. Constituents are moved due to topicalization at the Logical Form and due to feature strength movement at the Surface Structure. Classical Arabic (CA) allows word order scrambling, therefore, it can be said that MSA and NSA are two forms of CA. However, the vocabulary of NSA has greatly deviated from that of CA. The use of VSO instead of SVO means less subject-verb agreement and, hence, less morphology. The article also briefly considers Arabizi.