---
title: "The Syntax of qulk-clauses in Yemeni Ibbi — Albadani 2025"
description: "The paper offers a generative-syntax account of a frequent construction in Yemeni Ibbi Arabic (YIA), a dialect with little prior description."
authors: ["Zubaida Mohammed Albadani", "Mohammed Q. Shormani"]
year: 2025
venue: "arXiv:2512.22376"
source: "https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22376"
doi: "10.48550/arxiv.2512.22376"
arxiv: "2512.22376"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (arXiv)"
licence_url: "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/albadani-2025-syntax-qulk-clauses-yemeni-ibbi/"
---
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# The Syntax of qulk-clauses in Yemeni Ibbi Arabic: A Minimalist Approach

**Authors:** Zubaida Mohammed Albadani, [Mohammed Q. Shormani](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/mohammed-q-shormani/) · **Year:** 2025 · **Venue:** arXiv:2512.22376 · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (arXiv)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22376) · [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.22376) · [DOI 10.48550/arxiv.2512.22376](https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2512.22376) · [arXiv 2512.22376](https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22376) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7117719264)

**Citations:** 0 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The paper offers a generative-syntax account of a frequent construction in Yemeni Ibbi Arabic (YIA), a dialect with little prior description. The construction is built on *qulk* ("I said"), a single fused form made of the verb *qul* "say" and the clitic *-k* marking a first-person subject. *Qulk* can introduce embedded declaratives, questions and commands, usually with no overt complementizer.

The authors argue that these sentences are really two clauses. On their view, *qulk* is a clause-embedding predicate whose complement is a complete CP. The evidence they cite comes from clause structure, agreement, negation and word order.

Using the standard Minimalist toolkit (Merge, Move, Agree, Spell-out), they walk through derivations for each clause type. A post-syntactic step, Morphological Merger, then explains how clitics and verb forms surface. The analysis also covers bipartite negation, cliticization and null subjects.

The main conclusion is that spoken dialectal Arabic is as rule-governed as Standard Arabic and fits Minimalist assumptions. The work is purely theoretical and introduces no corpus, treebank or quantitative evaluation.

## Key points
- *qulk* = verb *qul* "say" + subject clitic *-k* "I", realized as one morphological unit.
- *qulk* introduces three embedded clause types: declarative, interrogative and imperative. All three typically appear without an overt complementizer but keep full sentential structure.
- Core claim: the construction is biclausal, with *qulk* selecting a whole CP complement rather than acting as a mere lexical verb or particle.
- The derivations use Merge, Move, Agree and Spell-out, plus Morphological Merger after syntax. For embedded commands, they draw on an Imperative Phrase (ImpP) projection proposed in earlier Minimalist work.
- Open questions the authors raise:
  - whether the addressee counterpart *qil-k* "you said" behaves the same way;
  - how and at what age children acquire *qulk*-clauses.

## Interesting ideas
- A fused "say + subject" form is treated as a real predicate taking a full clause, not as a discourse marker, even with no complementizer present. — For Mova (tree): English reported-speech openers like "I said" or "I'm like" followed by a bare clause could be attached as a verb with a clausal complement (ccomp) rather than as loose parataxis.
- In the biclausal analysis, the embedded clause keeps its own clause type, so a command or question stays a command or question inside the report. — For Mova (frames): speech-act detection should assign force to the embedded clause and attribute that act to the reporting speaker, not to the narrator.
- Syntax builds separate pieces, and a later morphological step fuses them into one surface word. — For Mova (tokens): splitting fused forms like "I'll" or "gonna" into syntactic words before parsing, while remembering the surface form, keeps the tree clean and generation faithful.
- Bipartite negation (*ma…-š*) is handled as one negative meaning carried by two separate exponents. — For Mova (frames): split English negation patterns could be collapsed into a single polarity feature on the frame, so negation is never counted twice or lost.
- The speaker-oriented form is contrasted with its addressee counterpart as a natural test of whether the analysis generalizes. — For Mova (learn): build minimal pairs that differ only in the person of the reporting verb and check that frames assign the source of speech correctly, as a negative control.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@misc{albadani2025syntax,
  title = {{The Syntax of qulk-clauses in Yemeni Ibbi Arabic: A Minimalist Approach}},
  author = {Albadani, Zubaida Mohammed and Shormani, Mohammed Q.},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2512.22376},
  eprint = {2512.22376},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2512.22376}
}
```

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