Agreement, Pronominal Clitics and Negation in Tamazight Berber: A Unified Analysis

Description

This book presents a study of various important aspects of Tamazight Berber syntax within the generative tradition. Work on Berber linguistics from a generative perspective remains in many ways uncharted territory. There has been hardly any published research on this language and its different dialects, especially in English -- this book fills some of these gaps and lays down the foundations for further research. Ouali looks at three seemingly disparate ranges of syntactic phenomena, namely Subject-verb agreement, Clitic-doubling and Negative Concord. These phenomena have received different analytical treatments, but Ouali proposes that they are all forms of agreement derived under the same Chomskian 'Agree' mechanism. The book addresses a fundamental question in the ongoing debate in recent Minimalism with regard to how subject-verb agreement is obtained and proposes a new analysis of the so-called Anti-Agreement Effect. It will be of interest to all syntacticians and to researchers in Afroasiatic languages.

Hamid Ouali is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA.

This book is an important 'must read' contribution both to contemporary syntactic theory and to the description and analysis of understudied Berber dialects. It illuminates fundamental aspects of syntactic theory and Minimalist method analyzing phenomena of enduring interest, including (Anti-) Agreement, Cliticization and Negative Concord while insightfully revealing their possible unification and deduction as facilitated by adopting and further clarifying certain central formal aspects of current Minimalist analysis. -- Samuel D. Epstein, Professor of Linguistics, University of Michigan, USA