The papers in this collection derive from the Annual Symposia on Arabic Linguistics held in Stanford (1999) and Berkeley (2000). The selection is noteworthy for its diversity of approach, and for a noticeable broadening of the kinds of questions that are being asked and the kind of data being gathered about Arabic in various settings. These papers cover many aspects of Arabic linguistic research, from models of language acquistion, to the borrowing of discourse patterns, and the use of 'secret' languages.

The papers in this collection derive from the Annual Symposia on Arabic Linguistics held in Stanford (1999) and Berkeley (2000). The selection is noteworthy for its diversity of approach, and for a noticeable broadening of the kinds of questions that are being asked and the kind of data being gathered about Arabic in various settings. These papers cover many aspects of Arabic linguistic research, from models of language acquistion, to the borrowing of discourse patterns, and the use of 'secret' languages.

This book is the first comprehensive account of the phonology and morphology of Arabic. It is a pioneering work of scholarship, based on the author's research in the region. Arabic is a Semitic language spoken by some 250 million people in an area stretching from Morocco in the West to parts of Iran in the East. Apart from its great intrinsic interest, the importance of the language for phonological and morphological theory lies, as the author shows, in its rich root-and-pattern morphology and its large set of guttural consonants. Dr Watson focuses on two eastern dialects, Cairene and San'ani. Cairene is typical of an advanced urban Mediterranean dialect and has a cultural importance throughout the Arab world; it is also the variety learned by most foreign speakers of Arabic. San'ani, spoken in Yemen, is representative of a conservative peninsula dialect. In addition the book makes extensive reference to other dialects as well as to classical and Modern Standard Arabic. The volume opens with an overview of the history and varieties of Arabic, and of the study of phonology within the Arab linguistic tradition. Successive chapters then cover dialectal differences and similarities, and the position of Arabic within Semitic; the phoneme system and the representation of phonological features; the syllable and syllabification; word stress; derivational morphology; inflectional morphology; lexical phonology; and post-lexical phonology. The Phonology and Morphology of Arabic will be of great interest to Arabists and comparative Semiticists, as well as to phonologists, morphologists, and linguists more generally.

This breakthrough study argues for a significant link between phonetics and phonology. Its authors propose that phonological rules and representations are tightly constrained by the interaction of formal conditions drawn from a limited universal pool and substantive conditions of a phonetically motivated nature. They support this proposal through principled accounts of a variety of topics such as vowel harmony, neutrality, and under specification.Unlike much work on this topic, Archangeli and Pulleyblank provide an explicit account of their assumptions, defined in a comprehensive theory of phonological rules and representations. The authors survey an impressive range of data, including an investigation of cross-linguistic patterns of ATR Harmony. They demonstrate that their theory is flexible enough to account for variation in individual phonological systems, yet it is firmly constrained by a small set of well-motivated principles. Extensive references throughout the book to published and unpublished work provide a valuable roadmap through this semicharted terrain.The approach in Grounded Phonology is modular, in that it presents a theory composed of subtheories, each of which is independently motivated, and the role of each module is to constrain the range of possibilities (of wellformedness)in its domain. Differences among languages can arise from differing intramodular selections or from interaction among modules.Diana Archangeli is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. Douglas Pulleyblank is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia.

Brought together in this volume are fourteen studies using a range of modern instrumental methods – acoustic and articulatory – to investigate the phonetics of several North African and Middle Eastern varieties of Arabic. Topics covered include syllable structure, quantity, assimilation, guttural and emphatic consonants and their pharyngeal and laryngeal mechanisms, intonation, and language acquisition. In addition to presenting new data and new descriptions and interpretations, a key aim of the volume is to demonstrate the depth of objective analysis that instrumental methods can enable researchers to achieve. A special feature of many chapters is the use of more than one type of instrumentation to give different perspectives on phonetic properties of Arabic speech which have fascinated scholars since medieval times. The volume will be of interest to phoneticians, phonologists and Arabic dialectologists, and provides a link between traditional qualitative accounts of spoken Arabic and modern quantitative methods of instrumental phonetic analysis.

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This work is the first book-length ethno-linguistic study of Sanan?- Arabic. The book comprises twenty-eight original oral texts which have been transcribed, translated and annotated by the author, a linguistic introduction to the texts, a glossary of all words contained in the texts, and a list of references. Each of the texts deals with one or more aspects of Yemeni culture. These include: the old city, oil presses, the old watercourse, bread, the development of restaurants, Yemeni cooking and recipes, travel in Yemen, gat, Yemeni architecture, the water-pipe, children's games of yesterday and today, Islamic festivals, and weddings. The texts are principally descriptions, narratives or mixed descriptive-narratives of personal experience. Together they tell a story of change and of what remains despite the forces of change - the rules of hospitality, fasting, food, the bath-houses - and show Yemen as a country where tradition and innovation are intriguingly interwoven.

This volume provides a general perspective on aspects of Arabic in relation to various areas of linguistics. To the general linguist, it is a source of information and data on Arabic analyzed within current models of analysis; to the Arabic linguist, it provides current analyses of both familiar and new data. The book is divided into three sections, which contain exciting papers on Arabic syntax (mostly within Government-Binding theory), textual analysis, and psycholinguistics. The volume opens with an overview of the current state of Arabic linguistics by the Editor and a major presentation by Charles Ferguson.

This volume makes important contributions to the growing body of descriptive and theoretical studies in Arabic linguistics. It focuses on the rich linguistic work being done on Arabic dialects. The papers on individual dialects draw attention to the micro-variation that exists, emphasize that they do not comprise a uniform group, and reveal the implications of dialectal variation for linguistic theory. The chapters are distributed over three parts: phonetics and phonology, syntax, and sociolinguistics. They address first and second language acquisition, historical linguistics, phonetics, aspects of negation, light verb constructions, raising verbs, and sociolinguistic variation. The book is indispensable reading for those working in dialect description, the analysis of Arabic and the Semitic languages, and linguistic theory more generally.