Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXIX: Papers from the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2015

256 Pages·2017·2.84 MB·English

by  Hamid Ouali (ed.)

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Edited by Hamid Ouali
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John Benjamins Publishing Company
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXIX
Studies in Arabic Linguistics
issn 2212-8042
This book series aims to publish original research in all fields of Arabic linguistics,
including – but not limited to – theoretical linguistics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics,
pragmatics, typology, and language acquisition. Submissions from all current theoretical
frameworks are welcome. Studies may deal with one or more varieties of Arabic, or Arabic
in relation to or compared with other languages. Both monographs and thematic collections
of research papers will be considered.
The series includes monographs and thematically coherent collective volumes, in English.
For an overview of all books published in this series, please see
http://benjamins.com/catalog/sal
Editors
Elabbas Benmamoun Enam Al-Wer
Duke University University of Essex
Editorial Board
Mahasen Hasan Abu-Mansour Mustafa A. Mughazy
Umm Al-Qura University Western Michigan University
Sami Boudelaa Jamal Ouhalla
United Arab Emirates University University College Dublin
Stuart Davis Jonathan Owens
Indiana University University of Bayreuth
Mushira Eid Janet C.E. Watson
University of Utah University of Leeds
Clive Holes Manfred Woidich
The Oriental Institute, Oxford University of Amsterdam
Jean Lowenstamm
CNRS-Université Paris 7
Volume 5
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXIX. Papers from the Annual Symposium on
Arabic Linguistics, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2015
Edited by Hamid Ouali
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics
XXIX
Papers from the Annual Symposium
on Arabic Linguistics, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2015
Edited by
Hamid Ouali
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
doi 10.1075/sal.5
Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress:
lccn 2014023415
isbn 978 90 272 0033 4 (Hb)
isbn 978 90 272 6486 2 (e-book)
© 2017 – 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 Company · https://benjamins.com
Table of contents
Introduction 1
Hamid Ouali
Sociolinguistics
chapter 1
A new direction for Arabic sociolinguistics 7
Reem Bassiouney
Phonetics and phonology
chapter 2
Prosodic domains of syllabification in Sudanese Arabic 33
Abdel-Khalig Ali
chapter 3
Acoustic properties of prominence and foot structure in Arabic 55
Irene Vogel, Angeliki Athanasopoulou and Nadya Pincus
chapter 4
Perceptual mapping between Arabic and English consonants 89
Zafer Lababidi and Hanyong Park
Morphology
chapter 5
Some issues for an analysis of the templatic comparative in Arabic
with a focus on the Egyptian dialect 129
Stuart Davis
Syntax
chapter 6
Participles in Syrian Arabic 153
Peter Hallman
vi Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXIX
chapter 7
Arabic first conjunct agreement and the interaction between constraints
on agree & movement 181
Phil Crone
chapter 8
The Merge Condition on Adjuncts: Evidence from circumstantial clauses
in Lebanese Arabic 205
Youssef A. Haddad
Language acquisition
chapter 9
Language growth in child Emirati Arabic 229
Dimitrios Ntelitheos and Ali Idrissi
Index 249
Introduction
Hamid Ouali
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
This volume features original work in various areas of Arabic Linguistics. It in-
cludes a set of selected peer-reviewed articles, which represent cutting edge re-
search by some very prominent scholars and some promising researchers in the
field. The volume, in this regard, continues a rich tradition that has been going
since 1991, with the publication of the first volume of the Perspectives on Arabic
Linguistics series. The articles cover a wide range of areas in Arabic linguistics,
namely Sociolinguistics, Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, and Language
Acquisition. They also feature a good number of Arabic dialects namely Egyptian
Arabic, Emirati Arabic, Jordanian Arabic, Lebanese Arabic, Sudanese Arabic, and
Syrian Arabic. Some of the contributions might be provocative. For example Reem
Bassiouney’s paper, starting with her provoking title, will no doubt trigger a reac-
tion and a fruitful discussion in the field. Her contribution in Sociolinguistics lays
the ground for what seems to be a fertile field of research in language variation and
language ideology, considering the fluid political and social states of the Arab world.
Other contributions, such as the ones by Stuart Davis, Abdel-khalig Ali, Lababidi
and Park, Ntelitheos and Idrissi, present pioneering studies in Arabic Morphology,
Phonetics, Phonology, and Language Acquisition respectively. Stuarts’s article on
comparatives in Egyptian Arabic, for example, is the first of its kind and could yield
more cross-dialectical comparative research on this topic. How Arabic can serve
as a testing ground for some theoretical constructs and approaches is exemplified
by Peter Hallman, Phil Crone, and Youssef Haddad’s contributions in the area of
Syntax. Hallman’s analysis of participles in Syrian Arabic, as adjectival rather than
verbal elements is based on strong argumentation and so is Haddad’s contribution
on circumstantial clauses in Lebanese Arabic. Phil Crone’s article on First Conjunct
Agreement is an example of how known empirical facts and well-studied phenom-
ena can still receive alternative, yet superior analyses. Crone proposes an elegant
theory that accounts for First Conjunct Agreement using independently motivated
principles in the Grammar. The remainder of this introduction synopsizes each
paper at a time.
doi 10.1075/sal.5.01oua
© 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company
2 Hamid Ouali
Bassiouney’s paper entitled “A new direction for Arabic sociolinguistics” deals
with language variation using sociolinguistic approaches that place language and
linguistic elements in larger social and cultural praxis, and examine their ideological
significance. Her approach, unlike variationist sociolinguistics for example, places
the significance of variation on ideological indexes related to “self- perception” and
“stance-taking”. She argues that the choice of language or elements of language are
anchored in the ideological processes involving identity, solidarity, authenticity, and
access to or lack of power. She shows this by using a combination of data sets con-
sisting of written representations of Egyptian Arabic, interviews on talk shows, and
the debates over the ideological underpinnings of Standard Arabic and Egyptian
Colloquial Arabic during the Egyptian revolution.
In the area of Phonetics, Irene Vogel, Angeliki Athanasopoulou, and Nadya
Pincus (VAP), present a contribution to the general understanding of prominence
patterns in Arabic. They present the results of a production study with speakers
of Arabic in a Jordanian context investigating a range of acoustic properties (f0,
duration, and intensity) in: (A) the initial syllable of trisyllabic words elicited so as
to bear ±stress and ±focus; and (B) all three syllables in the same words. The results
of investigation A are interpreted in terms of hypotheses related to the Functional
Load Hypothesis, whereby the fact that Arabic exhibits contrastive vowel (and con-
sonant) length is expected to reduce the likelihood that duration is used to mark
other contrastive categories, such as stress or focus. The results of investigation B are
used to motivate an analysis of the stress patterns of Arabic using uneven trochees.
VAP’s study would be of great interest to the larger discipline of the phonetics and
phonology of prosodic systems.
In the second paper in Phonetics, Lababidi and Park present an original study,
that focuses on Second Language learners (L2 learners) of Arabic and their percep-
tion of Arabic Consonants namely /t, d, ð, s, tʕ, dʕ, ðʕ, sʕ, q, x, ɣ, ħ, ʕ, ʔ/, and examines
the relationship between the Arabic consonants and the English categories. To be
more precise, their study describes how L2 learners perceptually map between
Arabic and English Consonants and provides a unique set of data on perceptual
patterns of Arabic consonants and their degree of similarity, or lack thereof, with
consonants that are found in the learners’ first language (English). This type of re-
search will be of interest to researchers interested in perceptual experimental work,
vowel systems, emphatic consonants, and Arabic phonology.
In Phonology, Ali’s paper entitled “Prosodic Domains of Syllabification in
Sudanese Arabic” deals with the repair of word-final unsyllabified consonants in
three different dialects of Sudanese Arabic and how it interacts with two types of
high vowel syncope in those same dialects. It is the first work in the literature to
distinguish between three different dialects of Sudanese Arabic with respect to the
domain of syllabification. Ali presents the precise domains of resyllabification and
Introduction 3
then shows how the domain issue interacts with the repair of unsyllabified word-fi-
nal consonants and with the process of high vowel syncope.
In Morphology, Davis’ thorough and insightful paper tackles the comparative
(e.g., [kibiir] ‘big’, [akbar] ‘biggest’) in Egyptian Arabic. Despite its morphological
focus, it touches on multiple aspects of linguistic grammar, including phonolo-
gy, and syntax, and raises a theoretical issue regarding root versus word-based
morphology in a thought-provoking manner. Davis shows how the comparative
provides evidence against a word-based analysis of Arabic, and in support of a root-
based analysis. It describes the template used to create the comparative, namely
aCCaC, and also describes the conditioning factors for two allophonic variants of
the comparative, namely aCCa and aCaCC. It points out that the templatic com-
parative does not inflect for gender or person (making it unlike other Arabic ad-
jectives), and compares the templatic comparative to a periphrastic formation in
which the adjective does inflect for gender and person. The article describes some
interesting gaps in the formation of the comparative, some of which are semantic
(e.g., it’s not possible to form a comparative for [majjit], ‘dead’), some of which are
conditioned by morphology (e.g., it’s not possible to form a comparative if the ad-
jective was formed with the derivational suffix -i, *[amsˤar] ‘more Egyptian’, some
of which are arbitrary, and some of which occur when the consonantal root does
not have a canonical shape. The article also examines the process of [r]-depharyn-
gealization as an interesting test-case for whether the process should be considered
derivational or inflectional.
In the area of syntax, Hallman presents a thorough analysis of participles in
Syrian Arabic. He presents convincing arguments for treating these participles as
adjectival and against treating them as verbal on a par with their passive partici-
ples despite their behavior as verbal elements (e.g., they license objective case and
complement structures typical of verbs).
The second paper in syntax is by Crone and it deals with one of the most stud-
ied and controversial topics in Arabic Syntax namely First Conjunct Agreement.
Arabic exhibits these famous facts where the verb either agrees with post-verbal
conjoined DP’s or with the first conjunct of the conjoined DPs. Crone presents an
original and superior analysis where he deduces first conjunct agreement from
three independently motivated properties in the Grammar: (i) The first conjunct
of a conjunction and it’s maximal projection are equally local to a c-commanding
head, (ii) Agree is a precondition for Move and (iii) The Coordinate Structure
Constraint. Property (i) derives optional resolved or closest conjunct agreement
with subjects in post-verbal position. The combination of (ii) and (iii) derives the
absence of conjunct agreement with subjects in preverbal position.
The third paper in the area of syntax is by Haddad who presents a novel analysis
of circumstantial clauses in Lebanese Arabic with and without the complementizer