Perceptual Reports in (Dialects of) Arabic

This paper offers what is to our knowledge the ?rst description and analy-sis of the encoding of perceptual reports in Arabic: we focus here on ModernStandard Arabic (MSA) and Maltese (MT) building on the analytic frame-work offered by Asudeh and Toivonen (2012) (henceforth AT). We show thata range of different syntactic constructions are used to encode perceptual re-ports with seem-class redicates while the core semantic observation devel-oped in AT, concerning the distinction between types of PSOURCE, is foundto hold robustly in these languages. In the light of the data we outline, an im-portant question for future work turns out to be that of distinguishing casesof (genuine) copy-raising from constructions with thematic subjects (for theverbs in question). While Maltese is ideologically and sociolinguistically aseparate language, it shares many key aspects of its syntax with the Westernvernaculars of Arabic, and is fruitfully considered as a dialect of Arabic forthe purposes of cross-dialectal comparison