Agreement in Qassimi Spoken Arabi

This paper discusses the agreement system in one of the most distinguished Saudi dialects. Qassimi Spoken Arabic is a dialect, which is spoken by around 931,085 people living mainly in Al-Qassim Province, which is located in the center of Saudi Arabia. Prochazka (1988) claims that QSA has many noticeable and distinguishable features make the dialect different from other Najdi dialects. QSA is different from MSA in its phonological, morphological, syntactic levels. QSA does not accept all word orders, which are present in either MSA or other Saudi dialects. They prefer VS order. However, they use the SV order when they have SVO structure due to the absence of case marking which might lead to ambiguity determining the subject and/or the object. QSA shows that the subject controls the agreement system in both the verbal clauses and in the equational clauses. QSA also shows to produce a different form of the passive verb like ʔkissarat: ‘is broken’, which is a form that is not seen to be used except in QSA. It has two different subject agreement markers suffixes: /-tin/ (second person non-singular feminine) and /-n/ (third person non-singular feminine) as in katab-tin: ‘You (2PF) wrote’ and katab-n: ‘They (3PF) wrote’. Native speakers of QSA use the direct object /-an/ or /-atan/ as a masculine or feminine pronoun respectively to replace masculine or feminine noun. Interestingly, QSA uses /-an/ with the copula verb ka:n: “be” as an agreement to the feminine subject. Thus, QSA shows to have some differences in the agreement system in the sentence level. 
This paper discusses the agreement system in one of the most distinguished Saudi dialects. Qassimi Spoken Arabic is a dialect, which is spoken by around 931,085 people living mainly in Al-Qassim Province, which is located in the center of Saudi Arabia. Prochazka (1988) claims that QSA has many noticeable and distinguishable features make the dialect different from other Najdi dialects. QSA is different from MSA in its phonological, morphological, syntactic levels. QSA does not accept all word orders, which are present in either MSA or other Saudi dialects. They prefer VS order. However, they use the SV order when they have SVO structure due to the absence of case marking which might lead to ambiguity determining the subject and/or the object. QSA shows that the subject controls the agreement system in both the verbal clauses and in the equational clauses. QSA also shows to produce a different form of the passive verb like ʔkissarat: ‘is broken’, which is a form that is not seen to be used except in QSA. It has two different subject agreement markers suffixes: /-tin/ (second person non-singular feminine) and /-n/ (third person non-singular feminine) as in katab-tin: ‘You (2PF) wrote’ and katab-n: ‘They (3PF) wrote’. Native speakers of QSA use the direct object /-an/ or /-atan/ as a masculine or feminine pronoun respectively to replace masculine or feminine noun. Interestingly, QSA uses /-an/ with the copula verb ka:n: “be” as an agreement to the feminine subject. Thus, QSA shows to have some differences in the agreement system in the sentence level.