Remarks on the arabic complementizer ‘inna

A Standard Arabic (SA) complementizer known as ‘inna poses a restriction on word order in the clause it introduces and induces accusative Case-marking on the otherwise nominative preverbal NPs.¹ Following Chomsky’s (2001) account of the morphosyntax of Case, this paper argues that ‘inna is a Case assigner and thus it carries an uninterpretable Case feature that determines the value which it assigns to an unvalued Case feature concerning accessible goal within A-bar projection. The paper shows that this argument captures the restriction imposed on ‘inna-clauses.