The Syntax and Semantics of wala ‘and not’ in Yemeni Arabic

Abstract

This paper examines the negative quantifier wala ‘and not’ in Yemeni Arabic. It focuses on two main aspects: the negative and emphatic behavior of wala. Wala can express both sentential and constituent negation based on its position in the sentence and it is always associated with a focus feature. Examining those aspects syntactically, it is shown that in Yemeni Arabic wala behaves differently from wala in the other varieties of Arabic to some extent, i.e. wala can be followed by a verb phrase, a noun phrase as well as a prepositional phrase. Therefore, I argue that wala does not have strict lexical selectional properties. Further, it is found out that any element follows wala must be associated with a focus feature and those elements are moved from their original position to a position that occurs below wala phrase. I assume that wala selects a focus phrase that appears immediately below it where various phrasal and lexical categories can occur. The paper also highlights several syntactic and semantic aspects of wala and discusses some of the previous accounts. Finally, I provide a unified analysis to all these aspects within the generative grammar framework especially Chomsky (2001); and Pesetsky and Torrego (2007).