Interaction between the Resultative and Goal Phrases with Aktionsart in English and Arabic

Abstract

The paper aims to investigate the interaction of resultative and goal phrases with lexical aspect (i.e. aktionsart) in both English and Arabic with regard to the event structure. Expanding our semantic and syntactic knowledge of this field in Arabic would relieve the gap in paucity of the research in this field. This goal is achieved by representing sentences, that contain resultative and goal phrases, into tree diagrams using the Minimalist Program proposed by Chomsky during 1990s. Furthermore, the current study tries to answer the questions such as: Are there constructions in English language that corresponds to Arabic Resultative and Goal phrases? The research also addresses the question about the place where the aspect phrase (inner aspect in Minimalism) is located in the tree diagramming since the aspect phrase is minimal projection in the functional heads in the minimalist theory. Moreover, this research addresses the impact that aspect has regard to telicity in resultative and goal phrases.  The data collected include one sample from English and one from Arabic. For English, the sentences are chosen from British National Corpus (henceforth BNC), whereas Arabic samples are gathered by consultations with different specialists in Arabic syntax and semantics. The study is also concerned with the syntax- semantics interface and morphosyntactic interplay. Classifying verbs according to their inherent properties i.e. lexical aspect (Aktionsart) is another objective of the present investigation.