An HPSG Approach to Negation in Libyan Arabic

Negation in Libyan Arabic, more precisely in the Arabic of Western Libya, including the Western mountains and the Tripoli area, involves a variety of complexities. It is marked on a number of different elements, it interacts in an important way with n-words and negative polarity items, and the copula has special present tense negative forms. In this paper we will set out the facts and then show how they can be accommodated within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The paper is organized as follows. In section 2, we look at negation on verbs and distinguish between a strong form and a weak form. In section 3, we consider negative forms of the copula, and in section 4, we look at other negative-marked words. Then, in section 5, we outline an analysis, providing relevant lexical descriptions, syntactic structures, and an account of weak negation. In section 6, we introduce a further restriction and show how it can be accounted for. Finally, in section 7, we summarize the paper.