The syntax of silent directional prepositions in Jordanian Arabic

Abstract

AbstractIn Jordanian Arabic (JA), the complement of some motion verbs optionally appears without a visible preposition in what is known as (P)reposition-drop (Ioannidou and den Dikken 2009). This article offers a detailed description of P-drop in JA, showing that the common properties of P-drop found in languages with P-drop hold in JA. I argue that Gehrke and Lekakou's (2013) pseudo noun incorporation approach to P-drop cannot account for the P-drop facts in JA. I show, through different diagnostics, that the prepositionless noun in JA does not exhibit the typical properties of pseudo-incorporated nouns. Instead, I argue that P-drop in JA involves a full PP–DP structure with a silent P head (Ioannidou and den Dikken 2009, Myler 2013, Biggs 2014, Bailey 2018). The findings of this article add insights to the ongoing debate regarding the underlying mechanisms involved in P-drop.