The Morphosytnax of Numeral-Noun Constructions in Modern Standard Arabic
On Monday, February 9, 2015, Dr. Muteb Al Qarni delivered a seminar on the morphosyntax of Numeral-Noun Constructions (NNC) in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The seminar was organized by the Language Research Centre.
Dr. Al Qarni's presentation focused on the Numeral-Noun Constructions in Modern Standard Arabic. He highlighted that the categorization of Arabic numerals provides insights into their syntactic structures and explains their inflectional patterns in terms of position, agreement, case, and definiteness. He emphasized that Arabic numerals do not belong to a single lexical category but rather each class of numerals belongs to a different category. For example, numerals 1-2 are considered adjectives, 100/0, 200/0, and 20-90 are nouns, and 3-10 are quantifiers.
During the presentation, Dr. Al Qarni also discussed the gender polarity in numerals 3-10 and proposed that they are inherently feminine. However, their feminine feature is deleted in the presence of a feminine counted noun due to the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) effect. Regarding case, it was suggested that all numerals assign genitive case to the counted noun. However, 20-90 numerals differ in that the genitive case defaults to accusative through an impoverishment rule.
The seminar was highly informative and in-depth, providing valuable insights into the morphosyntax of Numeral-Noun Constructions in Modern Standard Arabic.
For further inquiries or comments, you can reach out to Dr. Muteb Al Qarni via email at MutebAlqarni@gmail.com.
