This volume features eight peer-reviewed chapters based on papers presented at the 33rd Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, held at the University of Toronto in 2019. The chapters are divided into four sections: sociolinguistics, phonetics and phonology, syntax, and first language acquisition. They present research on relatively well-studied Arabic varieties such as the Moroccan, Jordanian, and Emirati varieties as well as understudied varieties such as the Palestinian dialects of Gaza and Jaffa, and the Saudi dialects of Al-Ahsa, Ha’il, and Faifi. The chapters address linguistic phenomena that range from language variation and change, the phonemic status and feature composition of rhotics, and the realization patterns of emphatic fricatives to the grammaticalization of aspectual markers, the syntactic and pragmatic aspects of post-wh-questions, and the acquisition trajectory of the definite article. The volume makes valuable descriptive and theoretical contributions to Arabic linguistics.

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 volume brings together ten peer-reviewed articles on Arabic linguistics. The articles are distributed over three parts: phonetics and phonology, sociolinguistics and pragmatics, and language acquisition. Including data from North African, Levantine, and Gulf varieties of Arabic, as well as Arabic varieties spoken in diaspora, these articles address issues that range from phonetic neutralization and diminutive formation to diglossia, dialect contact, and language acquisition in heritage speakers. The book is valuable reading for linguists in general and for those working on descriptive and theoretical aspects of Arabic linguistics in particular.

This volume includes papers on the study of Arabic dialects and their implications for general linguistics (Section I), as well of papers of a more general nature (Sections II and III). Because the Arabic dialects are similar in many ways, a study of their differences can help isolate precisely the range of permissible interlinguistic variation (i.e. the “parameters” of universal grammar). A number of papers in Section I focus on the contribution of dialect studies to a theory of crossdialectal and crosslinguistic variation; others focus on individual dialects, thus providing data and analyses that can further contribute to our understanding of this type of variation. The papers in Sections II and III of the volume are selected from the general session of the symposium and address sociolinguistic and historical aspects of Arabic, respectively.

The study of Arabic dialects has been an important and rich area of research over the past thirty-five years or so, with significant implications for modern linguistic analysis. The current volume builds on this tradition with ten scholarly contributions that provide novel data and analyses in multiple areas of Arabic linguistics: Syntax and its interfaces; regional and sociolinguistic variation; and first language acquisition. The linguistic facts in the volume are drawn from the various Arabic dialects spoken in North Africa, Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, and Standard Arabic, and the analyses proposed reflect current approaches in linguistic theory. The volume, therefore, should be of interest to formal linguists, sociolinguists, historical linguists, dialectologists, as well as researchers on first language acquisition. It is our hope that the papers in this volume will spur more interest in and research on further aspects of Arabic linguistics.

The papers in this volume cover many aspects of Arabic linguistic research, from investigations of the acquisition of phonetic detail, to the borrowing of discourse patterns, the use of "secret" languages and models of language acquisition.

This book investigates selected aspects of the grammatical development of Emirati Arabic, the variety of Gulf Arabic spoken in the United Arab Emirates and closely related to the varieties spoken in the rest of the Gulf States. While the acquisition of Arabic as a second language has been widely studied, first language acquisition of different Arabic dialects has received much less attention. Ntelitheos addresses this disparity by presenting a number of systematic studies on the acquisition of Emirati Arabic grammar based on a two-year longitudinal corpus of six children. He discusses the acquisition of the nominal domain, including definiteness and possession; the acquisition of verbal functional structure and agreement; and the acquisition of word order and negation in the syntactic domain. In addition, he defines several developmental stages for Emirati Arabic, based on established diagnostic tests. The discussion is framed within a general survey of the relevant literature in Arabic acquisition studies and combines new empirical data with rigorous discussion of several long-standing theoretical problems in the broader field of child language development.

This monograph investigates A’-dependencies in Standard German, Alemannic and Dutch where the dislocated constituent is indirectly, i.e. not transformationally, related to the position where it is interpreted. The study focuses on relative clauses and shows that an important part of the relativization system in these languages, long relativization, involves a hitherto ignored construction termed resumptive prolepsis. This construction is characterized by base-generation of the operator in the matrix middle-field and a resumptive pronoun in the position of the variable. It is shown that it involves short A’-movement in the matrix clause, empty operator movement in the complement clause and an ellipsis operation that links the two operators. While the link is directly visible in German and Dutch, Swiss German provides a more abstract version of resumptive prolepsis. Through a detailed examination of reconstruction effects and the properties of resumption in these constructions, the book provides new evidence for the role of ellipsis in A’-movement and for a base-generation analysis of resumption. More generally, it makes an important contribution to the modeling of long-distance dependencies and the study of A'-syntax.

This volume presents the latest research in linguistic modules and interfaces in Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). LFG has a highly modular design that models the linguistic system as a set of discreet submodules that include, among others, constituent structure, functional structure, argument structure, semantic structure, and prosodic structure; each module has its own coherent properties and is related to other modules by correspondence functions. Following a detailed introduction, Part I examines the nature of linguistic structures, interfaces, and representations in LFG's architecture and ontology. Parts II and III are concerned with problems, analyses, and generalizations associated with linguistic phenomena of long-standing theoretical significance, including agreement, reciprocals, possessives, reflexives, raising, subjecthood, and relativization, demonstrating how these phenomena can be naturally accounted for within LFG's modular architecture. Part IV explores issues of the synchronic and diachronic dynamics of syntactic categories in grammar, such as unlike category coordination, fuzzy categorial edges, and consequences of decategorialization, providing explicit LFG solutions to such problems, including those resulting from language change in progress. The final part re-examines and refines the precise representations and interfaces of syntax with morphology, semantics, and pragmatics to account for challenging facts such as suspended affixation, prosody in multiple question word interrogatives and information structure, anaphoric dependencies, and idioms. The volume draws on data from a range of typologically diverse languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Icelandic, Kelabit, Polish, and Urdu, and will be of interest not only to those working in LFG and related frameworks, but to all those working on linguistic interfaces from a variety of theoretical standpoints.

This volume is the first systematic attempt to survey current progress in the relatively new field of Experimental Arabic Linguistics. While experimental work on Arabic linguistics has appeared sporadically in several venues in the past, the chapters in this book provide a more coherent picture of the exciting directions which the field is pursuing. They provide insights into the complex nature of the Arabic language and how native speakers process it, using cutting-edge experimental methodologies in the fields of phonetics, psycholinguistics, and typical and atypical language development. This volume is of particular interest to scholars, researchers, and students at both the undergraduate and graduate level, in the fields of linguistics and language studies and can be a point of reference for scholars and researchers in the fields of theoretical and experimental Arabic linguistics.