Chapter 7. Morphosyntax

This chapter investigates patterns of gender and number agreement with plural and collective nouns in Vat. Ar. 13 — focusing on the distribution of feminine singular (FSG), masculine singular (MSG), masculine plural (MPL), feminine plural (FPL), and dual (DU) agreement with plural controllers, in both post-controller and pre-controller positions. The chapter demonstrates that the agreement system of Vat. Ar. 13 broadly conforms to the semantically-driven pattern attested in the Quran, pre-Islamic poetry, other early Christian Arabic manuscripts, and modern Arabic dialects, in which factors such as animacy, individuation, and syntactic distance determine agreement patterns — rather than the deflected agreement rules that are obligatory in later Classical and normative Modern Standard Arabic. Stokes shows that features such as inanimate plural nouns triggering plural agreement, and verbs preceding their nominal subjects displaying number as well as gender agreement, which have often been labelled "Middle Arabic" or sub-standard in the scholarly literature, are in fact typical of a wide array of prestigious Arabic corpora throughout the history of the language. The chapter constitutes the most data-rich in the book, covering every plural noun and collective noun in the manuscript and all of its modifiers.