A syntactic analysis of particle-based exclamatives in Gulf Arabic

This thesis investigates the syntactic structures and the properties of three particle-based exclamatives in Gulf Arabic: vocative exclamatives which involve two particles yaa and ʔaya, and non-vocative exclamatives which involve the particle ʔamma. It implements Chomsky (1995)'s Minimalist Program with Rizzi (1997)'s Split CP Hypothesis in the analysis of the data. I propose that particle-based exclamatives are derived from the underlying verb ʔa-taʕaʒab (1-exclaim) and the preposition min (about) via the ellipsis of the tense phrase which dominates the verb phrase and the preposition. The exclamative particle licenses their ellipsis by blocking the tense phrase and the preposition from spelling out to surface. Focus fronting contributes to the derivation to the fronting movement of the degree phrase, which hosts the exclamative nominals, to the spec of focus phrase prior to the ellipsis operation. I also propose that exclamative particles are complex by carrying two features: the exclamative feature and the deictic feature. Due to their complexity, exclamative particles are decomposable into two heads: an exclamative head and a deictic head, in accordance to Tsoulas (2015) and (2016)'s approach.