ABSTRACT
Recent Arabic syntactic analyses, such as, Ouhalla (1988, 1991, 1997, 2002), Benmamoun (1992, 1999, 2000), Fassi Fehri (1989, 1993, 2004), Mohammad (1989) among others have devised an analysis of the Arabic clause structure within the framework of Principles and Parameters as first suggested in Ouhalla (1988), Pollock (1989), Chomsky (1991), Johnson (1991) among several others. Accordingly, the INFL node (which corresponds to Modality in this work) is no longer analyzed as a singular host to multiple grammatical categories, such as aspect, tense, agreement, modality, and so on; instead, each morphological category is argued to head its own projection. This chapter is a refinement and extension of this line of inquiry. On the basis of our findings, as outlined in the previous chapters, and on the general assumption that verbal inflectional morphology is achieved at S-structure through verb movement into each phrase of which the corresponding affix is the head, we argue that, in MSA simple root clauses, both perfect and imperfect verb forms are derived first through (i) obligatory verb movement into Taxis-Aspect Phrase (henceforth Tax-AspP) of which the morphological hybrid affix is the head,1 (ii) then, whenever possible, into a TP headed by a morphologically null To. The so called V(erb) to I(nfl) movement is therefore reanalyzed as “V to Tax-Aspo to To movement.”2
