Functional Heads and Case Assignment in NPs in Standard Arabic

 One of the majoor assumptions of the GB-theory is that case is assigned under government. Lexical and functional categories are governors that may assign case. In the traditional analysis of NPs case is assigned only by a majoor lexical category (i.e. N), not a functional category. There have been serious attempts in the literature towards treating NPs as DPs by linguists like Szabolcsi (1987) for Hungarian, Abney (1987) for English, and Fehri (1988) for Standard Arabic (STA). The motivation has been to formalise a theory consistent with the spirit of X-theory and to outline a parallel structure for noun phrases and clauses making use of functional categories (e.g. INFL & DET). While clauses are viewed as IPs headed by Is, noun phrases are considered as DPs headed by Ds. The DP analysis, unlike the Standard analysis of NPs, conforms to the modifier-maximality constraint which is one requirement of X-theory