Abstract

This paper examines the left periphery of a variety of Najdi Arabic, propelling a plausible account to a syntactically debatable phenomenon; that is, the occurrence of two contrastive stress syntactic items, in terms of their position in the syntactic structure and their discourse functions, building on the debate on the structure of the left periphery in cross-linguistic syntax and the legitimacy of the items merged there at the interfaces. Adopting Rizzi’s (1997) Split CP Hypothesis, and Frascarelli & Hinterhölzl’s (2007) typology of topics in German and Italian, the proposed research argues that what Najdi spells out Frascarelli & Hinterhölzl’s (2007), which in turn, provides an explanation to the otherwise surprising observation. The research concludes that, though both items are contrastively stressed, they differ in terms of their featural grid, which accounts for the interpretation at the PF and LF interfaces (Chomsky 2000, 2001). The conclusion reached is that while the c-commanding contrastively stressed item expresses Focus, in particular Contrastive Focus (Ouhalla 1997; È Kiss 1998), hence, merged in Spec FocP where it is interpreted, the one c-commanded expresses Contrastive Topic Frascarelli & Hinterhölzl (2007), hence, merged in Spec C-TopP, where it is interpreted. The generalisation that immediately arises is that, though a clause is, in theory, taken to be incapable of hosting two contrastive stressed item, it host such items provided that the contrastive stressed carries different information structural information- Topic and Focus.

Key words: Key words: Force, Focus, Topic, CP split, Left periphery.