Considers marked and unmarked structures in modern Arabic in terms of defending a basic unmarked structure which carries the least presuppositional background to which other surface orders can be related and a lexical treatment of number in Arabic. (CB)

Shows, on empirical grounds, that a verb phrase (VP) is absent in the Arabic sentence structure through specific examination of the language's syntactic property. (CB)

Conversion, the deliberate transfer of a word from one part of speech to another without any change in its form, is a typically English phenomenon, conditioned but not caused by the extensive wearing-off of word endings and weakening of inflections. It has typically been treated as a syntactic matter, since no new words are produced, and its…