Abstract
This paper investigates three discourse particles, namely tara, ?a:d, and ?ah- in Hijazi Arabic (HA). It argues that they are C-related particles located in different projections in the split C-system in the sense of Rizzi (1997) and Frascarelli & Hinterholz1 (2007). Tara is a particle heading the Focus Phrase (FocP). ?a:d is a particle heading the Contrastive Topic Phrase (C-TopP). Pah- is a particle that forms a constituent merged in the Shifting Topic Phrase (S-TopP). Evidence is provided based on their semantics and syntax. Semantically, both tara and ?a:d evoke a contrastive interpretation marking an entity as contrasted focus and topic, respectively. On the other hand, Pah- marks an entity as a main topic that the discourse is about. Syntactically, the three particles differ in their compatibility with focussed constructions, their compatibility with S-Top marking expressions, their ability to occur in embedded clauses, and their syntactic positions relative to each other. Having analysed the three particles, the paper proposes a distinctive property between Focus (Foc) and Topic (Top) heads with respect to the edge feature. While the phonetically overt Foc(0) tara seems to have no edge feature that triggers the move of the focussed element to [Spec, FocP], both C-Top(0) and S-Top(0) motivate the marked constituent to merge/move to the specifier position.