Topic Particles, Agreement and Movement in an Arabic Dialect

Abstract The dialect of North Hail in Saudi Arabia, a variety of Najdi Arabic, has a set of sentence-initial particles marking topics of various kinds. The kinds of topics they mark correspond closely to the three classes of topics argued by Frascarelli & Hinterhölzl (2007) to be characteristic of Italian and German: Shift-Topic, Contrastive Topic, and Familiar Topic. In their work, as in much other work in the cartographic tradition, a hierarchy of abstract Topic heads is postulated in the C-domain, which host the topical phrases as specifiers. In North Hail Arabic, the Topic heads are not abstract, but overt, spelled out as particles. Some of the Topic headsmark topics by attracting them to the C-domain, as familiar from other languages, other particles mark topics by φ-feature agreement. The particles in the C-domain agree in person, number and gender with a DP in TP, subject or object. This is analysed in terms of Agree (Chomsky 2001, 2008). Arguments and adverbials are assigned particular Topic values either by agreement or by movement. The particles thus provide evidence that topicality can be a syntactic feature, inherent in lexical items (the particles), and assigned to constituents by operations familiar from standard syntactic relations such as subject agreement and case. The theory articulated observes the Inclusiveness condition, known to be a problem for the cartographic theory of topic and focus.