Structural Case Assignment in the Arabic Control Embedded Clause: The Role of Mood Beyond Agreement and Tense

This paper aims to demonstrate how Structural Case (SC) is assigned within the Control Embedded Clause (CEC) in Arabic. It illustrates that the partial agreement feature cannot assign case in configurations like verb-subject-object and post-verbal subject order, as they only exhibit number and gender features. This is clear evidence that there is a disassociation between the agreement feature and CEC case assignment. When considering tense, the absence or inadequacy of tense presents a significant obstacle to nominative SC assignment. Despite the expectation for a CEC tense event to coincide with the tense of the matrix clause, the data indicates that this is not the case, as the tense in the embedded clause does not occur at the same time as the matrix clause event. Thus, a genuine tense is not encoded in the control subjunctive clause, unlike in the tensed indicative control embedded clause. Therefore, mood can assign SC in the CEC. The researcher proposes that the existence of the subjunctive verb and the complementizer creates agree relation between v*0 and mood0. This enables the inheritance of features, resulting in the valuation of verb and mood. In this context, moodP is proposed to be selected by Fin0, and an agree relation takes place, resulting in a valued Mood0 by Fin0. The embedded subject and object are assumed to enter agree relation with mood0 and v*0, resulting in the subject and object getting assigned for nominative and accusative cases.