This book presents a study of various important aspects of Tamazight Berber syntax within the generative tradition. Work on Berber linguistics from a generative perspective remains in many ways uncharted territory. There has been hardly any published research on this language and its different dialects, especially in English - this book fills some of these gaps and lays down the foundations for further research.

Ouali looks at three seemingly disparate ranges of syntactic phenomena, namely Subject-verb agreement, Clitic-doubling and Negative Concord. These phenomena have received different analytical treatments, but Ouali proposes that they are all forms of agreement derived under the same Chomskian 'Agree' mechanism. The book addresses a fundamental question in the ongoing debate in recent Minimalism with regard to how subject-verb agreement is obtained and proposes a new analysis of the so-called Anti-Agreement Effect. It will be of interest to all syntacticians and to researchers in Afroasiatic languages. "Continuum Studies in Theoretical Linguistics" publishes work at the forefront of present-day developments in the field. The series is open to studies from all branches of theoretical linguistics and to the full range of theoretical frameworks. Titles in the series present original research that makes a new and significant contribution and are aimed primarily at scholars in the field, but are clear and accessible, making them useful also to students, to new researchers and to scholars in related disciplines.

Review
"This book is an important 'must read' contribution both to contemporary syntactic theory and to the description and analysis of understudied Berber dialects. It illuminates fundamental aspects of syntactic theory and Minimalist method analyzing phenomena of enduring interest, including (Anti-) Agreement, Cliticization and Negative Concord while insightfully revealing their possible unification and deduction as facilitated by adopting and further clarifying certain central formal aspects of current Minimalist analysis."--Samuel D. Epstein, Professor of Linguistics, University of Michigan, USA

Download File Size:6.41 MB

---