Aktionsarten: Projection and Subcategorization

Aktionsart (Aktionsarten – plural) has always been referred to as Aristotelian Aspect, Lexical Aspect, Event Type, or Inherent Aspect. Aspect and Aktionsarten have attracted many researchers across languages, including Standard Arabic. However, research onto the Hijazi Arabic (henceforth, HA) dialect in general, and the expression of Aktionsarten (lexical aspect) in particular is extremely minimal. Thus, this paper tries to fill in this gap by describing the lexical aspectual elements that express progressivity, how they are encoded morphologically to unveil the ambiguity between actions in progress and habitual actions. It also shows their morphosyntactic properties, the interactions with the functional categories in the hierarchy, and how these categories are distributed along the syntactic tree. HA uses the developed aspectual markers that can only precede imperfective verb forms to denote that the event is still on-going ‘unfinished’ at the moment of speaking or was on-going ‘past progressive’ when the time reference is past. These aspectual markers are derived from the roots√JLS and GʕD.The key finding of this paper is that the developed aspectual markers are projected into the head of what I call Aktionsart Phrase (AktP). This head occupies a position between the functional heads of Tense TP and Tax-AspP, and it interacts with the functional categories across the hierarchy