Morphological Variations of the Dual in Modern Standard Arabic

الملخص

This current study examines the morphological and syntactic features associated with the dual number in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which constitutes a unique grammatical category for designating precisely two units. Although singular and plural number categories are common across languages, the dual is quite uncommon. The Arabic language displays a complex and systematic utilization of the dual across numerous grammatical categories. In this paper, morphological expressions of dual forms and syntactic embedding in MSA are presented in detail. The study also explores the noun, adjective, demonstrative, pronoun, and verb types, describing how these types accommodate dual marking using certain affixes. The study  employs qualitative descriptive research, based on classical Arabic grammar sources, contemporary linguistic resources, and corpus examples. The main results are the retention of the dual in MSA as opposed to its loss in the majority of dialects, the role of gender and case in conditioning dual morphology, and the consequences of dual agreement for syntax. The research concludes by highlighting the significance of the dual in understanding morphosyntactic alignment in the Arabic language, suggesting that dual marking in MSA can be a model for studying typological patterns and agreement phenomena in inflectional languages.