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Grammatical Structure And Inflectional Morphology

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Verb-Subject Agreement Issues in Association with VSO and SVO Word Order Patterns in Hijazi Arabic
Abrar Abdulrahman J. Alsanosi
California State University, Fullerton
1. Introduction Arabic belongs to the Semitic language family. It has a complex syntactic structure and inflectional morphology. Throughout this paper, the main variety of Arabic to be syntactically investigated is “Hijazi Arabic” which is spoken mainly in the Hijaz region, the western coast of Saudi Arabia.
There are two basic types of sentences in Hijazi Arabic, the nominal sentence which starts with a noun, and the verbal sentence which starts with a verb (Mohammad, 2000: 2). As in:
Word order Sentences from Hijazi Arabic (reads from right left) Tree diagram

SVO (1) al-bɪnt katabat al-dars the-girl wrote 3sg fem. the-lesson
“the girl wrote the lesson”

VSO
(2) raħ al-walad al-suq went 3sg mas. the-boy the-shopping center
“the boy went to the shopping center”

VOS
(3) raħ al-suq al-walad went 3sg mas. the-shopping center the-boy
“the boy went to the shopping center”

(Bassam, Asma, Nadim, & Abeer, 2014: 613).
As seen in (1), (2), and (3), each of the sentences has a distinct word order patterns. For more explanation, in (1), the nominal sentence has a subject-verb-object or (SVO) constituent word order,

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