Sentence Structure

Parts of Speech

Palestinian Arabic terms are grouped into ten categories based on their morphological & syntactic properties. While each category has a variety of characteristics in terms of their usage, they may be defined by one or two distinct features. Navigate to each page to read a detailed description of their features.

1. Verbs are subject to person agreement with the sentence subject. They have tense & mood. Every sentence has one.
2. Nouns have grammatical gender, number & definiteness.
3. Adjectives are modifiers that have a noun as their referent & are subject to gender, number & definiteness agreement with it.
4. Numerals are adjectives that can head a counting clause & are not necessarily subject to grammatical agreement.
5. Adverbs are modifiers that do not have a noun as their referent & hence are not subject to agreement.
6. Prepositions are non-nouns that are always the head of a genitive structure.
7. Conjunctions link sentence elements to each other without interacting with them.
8. Determiners precede a noun & define its reference point.
9. Particles are functional terms that do not belong to any other part of speech.
10. Phrases include greetings, interjections, discourse markers & similar terms that are generally syntax-independent.

Clause Types