Hierarchy of adverbs in ghamdi arabic

Adverbs are one of the most understudied categories in linguistics. The structure of adverbs, their relationships, and their behavior in terms of an overall theory of clausal architecture have received intensive attention in the generative grammar literature (Ernst, 2004; Costa, 2000; Cinque, 1999; Cinque, 2004). Two prominent hypotheses that were put forward to explain the positions of adverbs in diverse languages have appeared in generative studies in recent decades. According to the feature-based theory, adverbs occur in a fixed relative order. Cinque (1999) came to this conclusion after collecting and comparing data from the English, French, Hebrew, and Chinese languages. This view presupposes that adverbs are specifiers of various functional projections. In contrast, the scope-based theory, the main representative of which is Ernst (2002), relies heavily on the semantics of adverbs. Ernst considers adverbs to be adjuncts. In Ernst’s approach, the distribution and licensing of adverbs is governed by Fact Event Object calculus, which is active on the LF side of grammar where the lexicosemantic requirements of adverbs must be taken into consideration. Although both hypotheses have been widely used in languages such as English, French, and German, there is a lack of studies that investigate the order of adverbs in Modern Standard Arabic. Moreover, Ghamdi Arabic, one of the most diffuse Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) dialects, did not receive the attention of linguists until recently (Alghamdi, 2016; Al-Shurafa, 2005; AlDahri, 2013). The existing studies on Ghamdi Arabic investigate phonological or sociolinguistic peculiarities, but they do not consider syntax and semantics. The aim of this study is to provide the first comprehensive investigation of adverb positioning in Ghamdi Arabic and to test the validity of the feature-based and scope-based hypotheses against the language data collected. The two hypotheses will be tested on examples that differ in their structure and nature. The findings of the study suggest that neither of the two hypotheses provides an adequate explanation of the order of adverbs in Ghamdi Arabic. Instead, a free adjunction analysis of the position of adverbs is explored here, and some ramifications for the Universal Grammar (UG) parameters that govern their placement are discussed.