Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics: Papers from the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics. Volume XIII-XIV: Stanford, 1999 and Berkeley, California 2000

265 Pages·2002·22.15 MB·English

by  Dilworth B. Parkinson (Ed.)

PERSPECTIVES ON ARABIC LINGUISTICS XIII–XIV
AMSTERDAM STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND
HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE
General Editor
E.F. KONRAD KOERNER
(University of Cologne)
Series IV – CURRENT ISSUES IN LINGUISTIC THEORY
Advisory Editorial Board
Raimo Anttila (Los Angeles); Lyle Campbell (Christchurch, N.Z.)
Sheila Embleton (Toronto); John E. Joseph (Edinburgh)
Manfred Krifka (Berlin); Hans-Heinrich Lieb (Berlin)
E. Wyn Roberts (Vancouver, B.C.); Hans-Jürgen Sasse (Köln)
Volume 230
Dilworth B. Parkinson and Elabbas Benmamoun (eds)
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XIII–XIV.
Papers from the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Annual Symposia
on Arabic Linguistics.
PERSPECTIVES ON ARABIC
LINGUISTICS XIII–XIV
PAPERS FROM THE THIRTEENTH
AND FOURTEENTH ANNUAL SYMPOSIA
ON ARABIC LINGUISTICS
Edited by
DILWORTH B. PARKINSON
Brigham Young University
ELABBAS BENMAMOUN
University of Illinois, Urbana
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
8 National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Dilworth B. Parkinson and Elabbas Benmamoun (eds.)
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XIII-XIV
(Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. Series IV, Current issues in
linguistic theory, ISSN 0304-0763 ; v. 230)
ISBN 90 272 4738 2 (Eur.) / 1 58811 272 1 (US) (Hb; alk. paper)
© 2002 – 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.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 36224 • 1020 ME Amsterdam • The Netherlands
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CONTENTS
Editorial Note vii
Introduction ix
Dilworth B. Parkinson
VOT Production in English and Arabie Bilingual
and Monolingual Children 1
Ghada Khattab
Discovering Arabic Rhythm through a
Speech Cycling Task 39
Bushra Adnan Zawaydeh, Keiichi Tajima
& Mafuyu Kitahara
An Argument for a Stem-based View of Arabic Morphology:
Double verbs revisited 59
Adamantios I. Gafos
The Broken Plural System of Moroccan Arabic:
Diachronie and cognitive perspectives 87
Robert R. Ratcliffe
Impersonal Agreement as a Specificity Effect in
Rural Palestinian Arabic 111
Frederick Hoyt
The Syntax of Small Clauses in Moroccan Arabic 143
Fatima Sadiqi
Borrowing Discourse Patterns: French rhetoric in
Arabic legal texts 155
Ahmed Fakhri
What Is a Secret Language? A case from a
Saudi Arabian dialect 171
Muhammad Hasan Bakalla
Sentence Processing Strategies: An application
of the competition model to Arabic 185
Adel Abu Radwan
Acquisition of Binding in L1 Arabic 211
Naomi Bolotin
Role of L1 Transfer in L2 Acquisition of Inflectional
Morphology 219
Mohammad T. Alhawary
Index of Subjects 249
EDITORIAL NOTE
The papers in this volume were presented at the Thirteenth
and Fourteenth Annual Symposia on Arabic Linguistics, held at
Stanford University in March of 1999 and at the University of
California at Berkeley in March of 2000, and sponsored by those
institutions. Of the nearly 50 papers presented at these symposia,
nine are published here. Two papers are also included from the
Fifteenth Annual Symposium. The papers presented at the symposia
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 final acceptance
for publication.
The transcription of all Arabic materials in the body of the
papers 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. For the citation of Arabic book titles in the reference
sections, however, a transliteration system based on standard usage
in Arabic and Middle East Studies journals has been adopted with
some simplifications in the use of diacritics. Vowel length, for
example, is not marked. The symbol ' represents the hamza and '
represents the 'ayn. We assume that the reader who knows Arabic
will be able to supply information represented by the diacritics.
The preparation and printing of the final manuscript was done
by the Arabic Linguistic Society. We are indebted to Tessa Hauglid,
who served as assistant editor as well as copy editor for this volume.

INTRODUCTION
Dilworth . Parkinson
The papers in this volume are noteworthy for their 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. The papers 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.
The paper by Ghada Khattab investigates the acquisition of a
low-level phonetic feature (voice onset timing-VOT) by Arabic-
English bilingual children, looking specifically at whether they
acquire one system or two, and whether their production matches
that of monolingual children for each language. This a particularly
interesting problem because the VOT of voiced consonants in
English are in the range of voiceless consonants in Arabic; the
results will thus throw light on the relationship between the
phonological level, where the voiced/voiceless distinction appears to
play a similar role in English and Arabic, and the level of phonetic
detail which are clearly quite distinct, and will specifically address
the issue of whether bilingual children acquire one phonological
system or two. The evidence clearly supports the notion that
bilingual children do acquire separate systems for each language, but
it also shows that the systems of bilingual children will match those
of monolingual children in both languages only if the input in both
languages is sufficient and comes at a young enough age. Khattab
makes the distinction between features that are relatively easy to
acquire and those that are more difficult, and shows that for the
difficult ones, greater input at a younger age is necessary, indicating
that there is a difference between the systems of 'perfectly balanced
bilinguals' and those who are exposed to one language over the
other. This echoes the results of a series of studies of short /a/ in
Philadelphia, that indicate that children who move into the area even
a little later than the critical age are unlikely to acquire the entire
(rather complex) system (Julie Roberts, 'Hitting a Moving Target:
Acquisition of sound change in progress by Philadelphia children',
Language Variation and Change 9:2.249-266).