Multiple Right Dislocation in Standard Arabic

Abstract

This paper investigates whether the insight of Agbayani and Ishii (2025) on the structure of Japanese multiple Right Dislocation can be extended to Standard Arabic. Standard Arabic confirms the anti-iterative conclusion of Agbayani and Ishii’s (2025) analysis of Japanese multiple Right Dislocation but not its single-versus-multiple partition. Japanese multiple Right Dislocation is understood to be a PF/prosodic operation rather than a narrow-syntactic movement operation. Standard Arabic supports this broader claim, but only insofar as the distinction between ordinary postverbal elements and elements that appear as afterthoughts following clauses is maintained. Thus, the multiple strings of right-peripheral elements in Standard Arabic can best be analyzed as a post-clausal prosodic/discourse package. The paper therefore rejects a direct transfer of the Japanese single-versus-multiple split to Standard Arabic, while preserving the central theoretical result that apparent multiple rightward displacement belongs at the syntax-PF interface rather than in iterative narrow syntax.