The Existential Quest: Exploring
Walker Percy’s Reimagining of the Literary Journey
Sami Alharbi
ABSTRACT
It has been observed that verb doubling occurs in
different languages, although there are some differences in the form
of the construction that make it difficult to explain within a
theory that views verb doubling as a manifestation of multiple-copy
spell-out. In this paper, I present novel evidence concerning Najdi
Arabic and discuss the distribution, morphosyntactic properties, and
meaning of doubled participles. The construction seems to occur only
with participles and to have a future-oriented meaning close to that
of contrastive focus. There are regular restrictions on the
placement of the copy relative to the object, the use of object
clitics, and the definiteness of the object: in the case of
post-object copies, the use of a clitic is required when the object
is definite, whereas a pre-object copy excludes the use of clitics.
Copy adjacency with nominal complements is possible but not
obligatory, whereas it is obligatory with clausal complements.
Negation shows that the additional copy contributes semantically to
the construction independently of the lexical verb, since negation
affects only the former. All these properties cast doubt on attempts
to explain all aspects of the construction using solely the Copy
Theory of Movement. Based on Müller’s analysis of the
phonological-copying mechanism, I propose treating the copying
morpheme ρ as a lexical item that inherits morphosyntactic and
phonological properties from the verb without losing its own
semantics. Thus, my account takes into consideration the
similarities between the grammatical behavior of the lexical verb
and its copy, although the copy’s lexical category and syntactic
locality restrictions still need to be investigated. Generally
speaking, the case of Najdi Arabic shows that cross-linguistic verb
doubling is not merely the spell-out of the same verb twice.
Keywords: Najdi Arabic; verb doubling; predicate doubling;
reduplication; Copy Theory of Movement.
