The syntax of the diminutive morpheme -aaj in Egyptian Arabic, Syrian Arabic, and Jordanian Arabic

Abstract

Abstract This article investigates the morphosyntactic behavior of the diminutive morpheme -aaj in three Arabic dialects (Egyptian Arabic, Syrian Arabic, and Jordanian Arabic). It argues that this morpheme is categorially a head that projects Size Phrase (cf. De Belder, Marijke. 2008. Size matters: Towards a syntactic decomposition of countability. In Natasha Abner & Jason Bishop (eds.), Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 116–122. Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project). In so doing, this analysis obviously challenges (Fassi Fehri, Abdelkader. 2018. Constructing feminine to mean: Gender, number, numeral, and quantifier extensions in Arabic. Lanham: Lexington Books) recent proposal that (non-)concatenative diminutives in Arabic are modifiers that are adjoined to categorized words when they indicate smallness in size. Additionally, this article provides an account of the observation that the diminutive morpheme -aaj can only appear with the feminine ending and a certain group of nouns, including collective aggregates (e.g., fruits and vegetables) and granular aggregates (e.g., grains, nuts, and seeds). We show that words suffixed with the diminutive morpheme -aaj can only give rise to an individuation reading (not a partition or non-count reading). This is syntactically interpreted as indicating that Size Phrase (headed by -aaj) is always dominated in Arabic grammar by Division Phrase (cf. Borer, Hagit. 2005. In name only. Oxford: Oxford University Press), whose presence derives an individuation reading.