A Lexical-Functional Grammar Account of Aspectual and Complementation Structures of Phasal Verbs in Southern Saudi Dialects

Abstract

This paper investigated the syntactic, semantic, and functional behavior of phasal verbs in Bisha Colloquial Arabic (BCA)—a southern Saudi dialect that has received limited formal description in modern linguistic research. Phasal verbs, or aspectual predicates, denote the temporal stages of an event—its inception, continuation, or termination. The present study applies Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) to describe how Bisha Arabic encodes these aspectual meanings through specific lexical verbs and complement structures. Based on an analyzed dataset and corroborated by native speaker judgments, the study identified and analyzed core phasal verbs: bada ‘begin’, ʕād ‘resume’, istamar ‘continue’, waqaf ‘stop’, xallaṣ ‘finish’, and ʔinḥā ‘end’. The analysis revealed that Bisha Arabic phasal verbs form a cohesive subclass of semi-auxiliary predicates selecting non-finite imperfective complements that share their subject with the matrix clause—modeled formally as XCOMP structures in LFG. The verbs bada, ʕād, and istamar display raising-like properties, while waqaf, xallaṣ, and ʔinḥā exhibit control-like behavior. These findings align Bisha Arabic with general Arabic aspectual typology yet highlight dialectal innovations, particularly in verbs such as rajʕ (‘return/resume’), baʕad (‘still/continue’), and ʕawad (‘resume again’), which have developed new grammaticalized phasal meanings. Through a detailed LFG analysis, including c-structure and f-structure diagrams, this paper demonstrates that phasal verbs in Bisha Arabic encode event phases through a functionally governed syntactic strategy. The results contribute to broader typological and theoretical debates concerning the representation of aspect and the auxiliaryhood continuum in Arabic dialectology.