Clitics in Standard Arabic

This paper offers a description of weak and strong pronouns in Standard Arabic (SA) with a special focus on the object pronominals, and discusses their views as affixes, clitics, or incorporated pronouns. The discussion involves a comparison of object pronominals between Standard Arabic and some colloquial Arabic varieties on the one hand, and Romance languages on the other hand. A brief overview of the distinction between clitics and affixes is also presented. It has been shown that pronominal clitics in Arabic in general and in SA in particular exhibit distinct properties which make them different from other clitics existing in Romance languages. Such distinctive properties comprise their appearance on all lexical and some functional categories, the constant right-adjunction to their hosts, and the lack of overt Case distinctions manifestation, i.e., there is no clear-cut boundary for the Case-marker morpheme, unlike Determiner Phrases (DPs). The last property concerns their attachment to the closest head; the movement involves only one simple head-to-head movement. All these features associated with Arabic clitics are different from their counterparts in Romance languages. In addition, it has been observed that verbs, nouns, and prepositions do not agree with their object complements. These properties and observations lead to the conclusion that object attached pronouns in Arabic are best viewed as incorporated pronouns rather than clitics or agreement markers.

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