Adverbial Accusative Case in Arabic

The accusative case is mainly attached the objects. It is the case that marks objects in transitive clauses however, in many languages accusative case is not only found on objects, but it is extended to mark NP adverbials. It is attached to elements outside the domain the verb. Consider the example from Arabic below.

(1) ðahab-tu ʔila al-madiinat-I layl-an

went- Is to the-city-gen night-acc

‘I went to the city at night’

In the example above, we find the word layl-an ‘at night’ is marked with accusative case though it is not an argument. It is adverb of time. The occurrence of case on adjuncts has been termed adverbial case or semantic case. It should be noted that this type of case has not received much attention in the literature of the modern linguistics. Only a few studies have been conducted to investigate this phenomenon. When discussing some examples about the adverbial case, Butt (2006, p. 7) states the following “Given has basic assumption that the primary purpose of case is to mark the arguments of a predicate this type of data remains an issuer which has not as yet received a good/standard solution within modern syntactic theories.” By this type of data, she refers to some data German and Korean where some adverbials are marked with accusative case. So, this issue has not been dealt with in some detail in modern linguistics as also stated by Butt in another context: “Very little work has been done on semantic case, primarily because it tends to be associated with adjuncts, and the theoretical concern is with licensing and constraining the appearance of core verbal arguments” (p.71).