Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics: Papers from the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics. Volume III: Salt Lake City, Utah 1989

287 Pages·1991·21.36 MB·English

by  Bernard Comrie

PERSPECTIVES ON ARABIC LINGUISTICS III
AMSTERDAM STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND
HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE
General Editor
E.F. KONRAD KOERNER
(University of Ottawa)
Series IV - CURRENT ISSUES IN LINGUISTIC THEORY
Advisory Editorial Board
Henning Andersen (Los Angeles); Raimo Anttila (Los Angeles)
Thomas V. Gamkrelidze (Tbilisi); Hans-Heinrich Lieb (Berlin)
J. Peter Maher (Chicago); Ernst Pulgram (Ann Arbor, Mich.)
E. Wyn Roberts (Vancouver, B.C.); Danny Steinberg (Tokyo)
Volume 80
Bernard Comrie and Mushira Eid (eds)
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics III
PERSPECTIVES ON
ARABIC LINGUISTICS III
PAPERS FROM
THE THIRD ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM
ON ARABIC LINGUISTICS
Edited by
BERNARD COMRIE
University of Southern California
Los Angeles
and
MUSHIRA EID
University of Utah
Salt Lake City
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
1991
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Symposium on Arabic Linguistics (3rd : 1989 : University of Utah)
Perspectives on Arabic linguistics III : papers from the Third Annual Symposium on
Arabic Linguistics / edited by Bernard Comrie and Mushira Eid.
p. cm. - (Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science.
Series IV, Current issues in linguistic theory, ISSN 0304-0763; v. 80)
Symposium held at the University of Utah, Mar. 3-4, 1989.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
I. Arabic language — Syntax — Congresses. 2. Arabic language — Grammar ~ Congres
ses. 3. Arabic language ~ Social aspects - Congresses. I. Comrie, Bernard, 1947-
II. Eid, Mushira. III. Title. IV. Title: Perspectives on Arabic linguistics three. V. Title:
Perspectives on Arabic linguistics 3. VI. Series.
PJ6151.S96 1989 <Orien Arab>
492'.75-dc20 91-7898
ISBN 90 272 3577 5 (Eur.) / ISBN 1-55619-135-9 (US) (alk. paper) CIP
© Copyright 1991 - John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or
any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
Table of Contents
Foreword vii
Introduction viii
I. ARABIC IN RELATION TO OTHER LANGUAGES
On the Importance of Arabic to General Linguistic Theory 3
Bernard Comrie
Verbless Sentences in Arabic and Hebrew 31
Mushira Eid
Guttural Phonology 63
John McCarthy
Arabic Loanwords in Acehnese 93
Awwad Ahmad Al-Ahmadi Al-Harbi
A Contrastive Study of Middle and Unaccusative
Constructions in Arabic and English 119
Abdelgawad T. Mahmoud
II. GRAMMATICAL PERSPECTIVES
Epenthesis in Makkan Arabic:
Unsyllabified consonants vs. degenerate syllables 137
Mahasen Hasan Abu-Mansour
Computer Analysis of Arabic Morphology:
A two-level approach with detours 155
Kenneth Beesley
Causatives in Arabic 173
Elabbas Benmamoun
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
III. SOCIO- AND PSYCHOLINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVES
Women, Men, and Linguistic Variation in the Arab World 199
Keith Walters
Code-Switching and Linguistic Accommodation in Arabic 231
Abdel-Rahman Abu-Melhim
Agrammatism in Arabic 251
Sabah Safi-Stagni
Index 271
FOREWORD
The papers in this volume were presented at the Third Annual
Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, which was held at the University of
Utah, Salt Lake City, March 3-4,1989. The symposium was sponsored
by the Arabic Linguistic Society and the University of Utah's College
of Humanities, the Middle East Center, the Department of Languages
and Literature, and the Linguistics Program. The papers presented at
the symposium were selected on the basis of an anonymous review of
abstracts submitted to the Program Committee. The papers included in
the volume were further reviewed by the editors before their final
acceptance for publication.
The transcription of all Arabic materials in the body of the
papers, unless otherwise specified, follows the International Phonetic
Alphabet, or standard equivalents. The Arabic emphatics are
represented by a dot underneath the symbol, and long vowels as
sequences of two vowels.
The preparation of the final manuscript of the volume was done
at the Middle East Center of the University of Utah, Salt Lake City.
We would like to acknowledge the support the Center has provided
during the major part of the editorial process. In particular, we would
like to acknowledge the editorial assistance of Tessa Hauglid of the
Middle East Center staff and thank her for her efficiency and her
interest in the volume.
INTRODUCTION
BERNARD COMRIE
MUSHIRA EID
The papers in the first section of the volume are responses to
the theme "Arabic in relation to other languages", and it is interesting
to see how different authors have interpreted this theme in quite
different, but all equally valid, ways. Comrie examines ways in which
particular properties of Arabic — including properties that show
small but significant differences in different varieties of Arabic — can
contribute to the sharpening of ideas in general grammatical theory.
For instance, Arabic has a tense-aspect-mood system remarkably
similar to that of creóles, although Arabic is in no sense a creole; he
suggests that this is in keeping with the view that the formal means
used to express tense-aspect-mood is closely linked to the semantic
categories expressed (cf. Dahl 1985:184-187), rather than a particular
tense-aspect-mood system being a specific property of créoles, as
argued in Bickerton's bioprogram approach (Bickerton 1981:58-59).
Another paper showing how Arabic and other Semitic languages can
contribute to general linguistic theory is McCarthy's paper on the
need to recognize a category of 'guttural' consonants in phonology. A
number of synchronic and diachronic processes in various Semitic
languages provide evidence for the like behavior of consonants with
uvular, pharyngeal, and glottal places of articulation, yet current
theories of distinctive features, deriving from the system proposed in
Chomsky & Halle (1968), provide no way of capturing the similarities
among these different places of articulations, thus failing to capture a
particularly salient significant generalization.
INTRODUCTION ix
The comparison of genetically closely-related languages, such as
the Romance languages, has played an important role in the recent
history of linguistics, and Eid's contribution shows that results of
equal import can be obtained from the study of the closely related
Semitic languages, in this case Arabic and Hebrew. The particular
phenomenon that Eid investigates is the occurrence of personal
pronouns in copular sentences of the type Nadia is the doctor. While
the two languages show striking similarities, there are also significant
differences; and Eid argues that a comprehensive account of the
phenomenon requires a combination of formal grammatical and
functional considerations.
Given the extent to which English is studied in Arabic-speaking
countries and the smaller but still not insignificant extent to which
Arabic is studied in English-speaking countries, contrastive studies of
Arabic and English grammar are important pedagogically as well as
theoretically, and one such contrast between Arabic and English is the
topic of Mahmoud's paper. He demonstrates that while one type of
English intransitive construction, namely, unaccusative constructions
(e.g., the butter melted), has direct correspondents with similar
properties in Arabic, there is no direct correspondent in Arabic for
the superficially similar English middle constructions (e.g., the new
car drives well).
One of the ways in which Arabic has interacted with other
languages has been through the spread of Islam and the subsequent
borrowing of Arabic words into the languages of other Islamic
peoples. Al-Harbi examines the phonology of Arabic loans in
Acehnese, the language of one of the most strongly Islamic
communities of Indonesia. He argues that the phonetic adaptation of
Arabic loans to conform to Acehnese phonological patterns can be
accounted for in terms of surface phonetic conditions, i.e., segments
are assimilated in terms of the phonetically closest segment chosen
from the set of positionally admissible segments constrained by the
surface phonetic constraints of the borrowing language, essentially the
position of Shibatani (1973), as opposed to approaches like Hyman's