Prenominal and Postnominal Adjectives in Arabic

This article discusses the status of prenominal and postnominaladjectives in Arabic. It is argued that Kremers’s treatment of adjectives isnon-economic as it generates two different syntactic representations for prenominal andpostnominal adjectives. It also undermines endocentric properties of phrasal projectionsand fails to correctly predict the definiteness status of adjectival construct stateheads. The article proposes an alternative analysis with a single underlying syntacticstructure for both types of adjectives. The need to have nominal features of thespecifier (Spec) of the agreement phrase head (Agr) checked and licensed within thedeterminer phrase (DP) triggers leftward noun phrase (NP) movement, thus formingpostnominal adjectives. In prenominal adjectives, however, the strong DefinitenessFeature (DEF) on the determiner (D) causes the adjective phrase to raise to thespecifier of the DP