False resultatives: The interaction of agreement and creation in Northern Galilee Levantine Arabic

Abstract

Arabic dialects in general do not allow resultatives. We present here novel data from a dialect of Levantine Arabic, Northern Galilee Arabic, which show that Arabic does have a subtype of resultatives: false resultatives (Rapoport 1999; Mateu 2000; Zarka 2019).The false resultative predicates in this dialect of Arabic exhibit two different agreement patterns. We claim that the difference in agreement derives from the element modified, as dictated by the distinct structures projected by two different verb types that are distinguished here: explicit creation and implicit creation (Geuder 2000; Levinson 2010).The agreement patterns in Northern Galilee Arabic thus demonstrate a grammatical parallel to the conceptual distinction between two creation verb types.