Backward control in Modern Standard Arabic

Abstract

This paper is the third in a series of papers dedicated to the investigation of subjunctive complement clauses in Modern Standard Arabic. It began with Arad Greshler et al.'s (2016) search for obligatory control predicates in the language and continued with Arad Greshler et al.'s (2017) empirical and theoretical investigation of the backward control construction. In this paper we show that Arad Greshler et al.'s (2017) findings and ultimate analysis, which is cast in a transformational framework, can be straightforwardly formalized using the existing principles and tools of HPSG. Our proposed analysis accounts for all the patterns attested with subjunctive complement clauses in Modern Standard Arabic, including instances of control and no-control.