الفهرس 
THEORETICAL BACKGROUNDOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
The purpose of this study is to investigate the construction of question formation mainly in Iraqi Arabic (IA) dialect with reference to English adopting the Minimalist Program (MP). This study falls into two parts. The first part investigates the wh- movements in English and IA in the light of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program. The second part of the study analyzes the strategies of wh-questions in IA which are the wh-in-situ, the intermediate Comp, and the wh-movement strategy with respect to Bounding Theory, the Split vP analysis, and Phase movement.
A new set of data concerning the behavior of wh-operators in Iraqi Arabic is represented. This data study that the Logical Form movement in IA must observe locality constraints. The wh-operator must move to the closest specifier (Spec) position of a [+WH] complementizer (Comp).
The study diagnoses a unique property of the wh-operator in IA. Unlike English where the wh-operator may occur in the Spec of the matrix Comp, or in-situ as in Chinese, in IA wh-operator may occur in any Spec of an intermediate Comp between the matrix Comp and the in-situ position. Whether the hosting Comp is [+WH] or [-WH], the wh-operator in IA exercises wide scope over the entire question having a main question reading. IA as a dialect has proven to be one which is rich in its analysis of question formation. The researcher empirically tries to prove this optionality of the wh-phrase in the light of MP analysis)
Chomsky’s Minimalist Program captures a number of unrelated phenomena that pertain to the behavior of wh-questions in IA. Mostly, the behavior of the wh-operator that occurs in a [-wh] Comp in a main question. An enriched tree can smoothly capture the behavior of wh-questions in IA.
The minimalist tree, which is an input to the Phonetic Form (PF) and Logical Form (LF) components, may distinguish between the visibility and the invisibility of wh-operators. The IA wh-operator in a [-WH] Comp is visible at (PF) but invisible at LF. MP relies on feature checking to account for the movement of any element in the sentence. The uninterpretable feature of one element, called the Probe, needs to be checked by another element, called the Goal. A way of checking this feature comes in the form of movement of the Goal to a position where it can get into a checking relation with the Prob.
The vP Split analysis and Phase theory are adopted for the successive cyclic movement of the wh-operator in mono, bi, and tri-clauses. The two phases, CP and transitive vP, are diagnosed in the analyses of the IA data.
Key words: Minimalism, Locality restrictions, Ross’s constraints, wh-movement, Wh-in-situ, Logical Form (LF), Scope, phase, split vp analysis.