Yemeni Ibbi Arabic wh-agreement analyzed via Agree across phases

This article investigates the syntax of wh-agreement in Yemeni Ibbi Arabic (YIA), where agreement inflections appear on Wh-operators, C, T/V, and v. The authors propose an Agree across phases (AAP) approach anchored in Feature Inheritance, distinguishing between Agree as MATCHING for Cs/vs and feature valuation for Ts/Vs.

• Suffixes -eh, -uh, -nen, and -um are identified as morphological markers of wh-agreement, having grammaticalized from Stannard Arabic third-person pronouns.
• The study argues that YIA data provide empirical support for the universality of Universal Grammar by demonstrating how specific I-language operations reflect invariant principles.
• Findings indicate that the wh-agreement mechanism in YIA is more morphosyntactically robust than in Greek, Indonesian, Palauan, and Irish.

The authors conclude that their proposal offers a straightforward account of wh-agreement cross-linguistically and provides compelling evidence for AAP as a Universal Grammar approach to long-distance dependencies.