The ability root in Palestinian Arabic and its actuality entailment
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The ability root in Palestinian Arabic and its actuality entailment Sam Alxatib1
Received: 3 August 2018 / Accepted: 4 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The ability root in Palestinian Arabic (PA) licenses actuality entailments under perfective-marking, but not under imperfective-marking. In this, the root mirrors the behavior of similar expressions in other languages. However, further morphosyntactic environments that are unique to PA provide empirical arguments against certain theoretical accounts of actuality entailments, and show a robust correlation between aspect-shifting and actuality-entailment licensing. Keywords Actuality entailment · Palestinian Arabic · Aspect · Telicity · Modals · Implicativity · Aspect-shift
1 Introduction This paper has two goals. The first is to add to the growing body of cross-linguistic data relating to the puzzling phenomenon of Actuality Entailment (AE). The data that I will present come from Palestinian Arabic (PA), and they are focused primarily on the behavior of the PA ‘ability’ root. The second goal is to discuss the relevance of these data to theories of AE licensing. I will pay particular attention, first, to the role that is played, or thought to be played, by the imperfective form (IMP) in blocking AEs, and second, to the connection between AE-licensing and aspect shift. On the first issue, I will claim that the PA imperfective form does indeed block AEs, but not because of its modality, as thought by Bhatt (1999, 2006) and Hacquard (2006, 2009). Rather, the blocking comes from the viewpoint aspect semantics of IMP. The argument will be based on comparing IMP to another PA form that blocks AEs, but that does not appear independently to introduce any modal layer of its own. On the second issue, I will show that the ability root in PA licenses AEs in a number of morphosyntactic contexts: the past perfective is one (PFV)—PA is like many languages in
B S. Alxatib 1
Linguistics Department, Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, USA
S. Alxatib
this respect—but also the simple future (FUT), the progressive (PROG), and the past habitual (HAB). These forms have in common another feature, which is that they give other stative roots a shifted, telic interpretation. I will claim this to provide support for the view that links AE licensing to aspect-shifting (Homer 2010, 2011). I will begin with a short description of AEs (Sect. 2), along with a review of some of the prominent accounts of them (Sect. 3). In Sect. 4 I summarize the main PA facts, and in Sect. 5 I discuss what I believe they tell us about the source of AEs, as outlined above.
2 Ability and Actuality Entailments 2.1 Background Actuality Entailments (AEs) are inferences whose premises appear to be modal, but whose content is that the modality was realized in the evaluation world. Languages that most clearly exhibit AEs are typically languages that morphologically distinguish the perfective (PFV) from the imperfective (IMP), and that permit the two markers to accompany modal verbs/auxiliaries. The ex
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