ABSTRACT
Studies on the syntax of Arabic have produced considerable literature dealing with a number of syntactic phenomena in spoken and Standard Arabic (MSA) such as the syntax of subjects, agreement, and the construct state. Other syntactic phenomena such as Negative Sensitive Items (NSIs) have received much less attention within the traditional approaches. The chapter provides an overview of the state of the art on the important category of expressions. It presents the lexical categories of NPIs and Negative Concord Items (NCIs) in MSA, Jordanian Arabic (JA), Egyptian Arabic (EA) and Moroccan Arabic (MoA). The syntactic dependency between NSIs and negation varies along two main parameters: the lexical category of the NSI and the language variety. The chapter discusses the syntactic dependencies between the various lexical categories of NPIs and NCIs from the perspective of the different language varieties and negation. It deals with the syntactic dependencies of NCIs and negation.
