Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXVI: Papers from the annual symposium on Arabic Linguistics. New York, 2012

311 Pages·2014·1.5 MB·English

by  Reem Khamis-Dakwar

Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXVI
Studies in Arabic Linguistics
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
University of Illinois University of Essex
Editorial Board
Mahasen Hasan Abu-Mansour Mustafa A. Mughazy
Umm Al-Qura University Western Michigan University
Sami Boudelaa Jamal Ouhala
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 Salford
Clive Holes Manfred Woidich
The Oriental Institute, Oxford University of Amsterdam
Jean Lowenstamm
CNRS-Université Paris 7
Volume 2
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXVI
Edited by Reem Khamis-Dakwar and Karen Froud
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics
XXVI
Papers from the annual symposia on Arabic Linguistics
New York, 2012
Edited by
Reem Khamis-Dakwar
Adelphi University
Karen Froud
Columbia University - Teachers College
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.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics (26th : 2012 : New York City)
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXVI : Papers from the annual symposium on Arabic
Linguistics. New York, 2012 / Edited by Reem Khamis-Dakwar and Karen Froud.
p. cm. (Studies in Arabic Linguistics, issn 2212-8042 ; v. 2)
Papers were selected from the Arabic Linguistics Society Annual Meeting that was held
in New York City in March, 2012.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Arabic language--Congresses. 2. Arabic language--Grammar--Congresses.
I. Khamis-Dakwar, Reem, editor. II. Froud, Karen, editor. III. Title.
PJ6303.A56 2014
492.7--dc23 2014023415
isbn 978 90 272 0030 3 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 6968 3 (Eb)
© 2014 – 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
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Table of contents
Introduction: Diversity and innovation in Arabic Linguistics 1
Reem Khamis-Dakwar and Karen Froud
The development of future participles and future tense markers from motion
predicates: Semantic, morphosyntactic and structural reduction 9
Jamal Ouhalla
Yod-dropping in b-imperfect verb forms in Amman 2 9
Enam Al-Wer
Syntax
Prosodic constituency and locality in Levantine Arabic: Long-distance
negative concord 4 7
Frederick M. Hoyt
Negation and the subject position in San’ani Arabic 7 5
Elabbas Benmamoun and Khalid Al-Asbahi
Splitting neg: The morphosyntax of sentential negation in Cairene
Egyptian Arabic revisited 9 1
Usama Soltan
Multiple agreement in Arabic 121
Hamid Ouali
Cyclic AGREE derives restrictions on cliticization in classical Arabic 135
Martin Walkow
Phonology
Secondary stress exist in Cairene Arabic? 163
Rajaa Aquil
 Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXVI
Paradoxical paradigms! Evidence from Lebanese Arabic phonology 185
Youssef A. Haddad and Caroline Wiltshire
Sociolinguistics
The Arabic of Bukhara: A Principal parts analysis of the effects of contact
influence on morphological typology 213
Keri Miller
Semantic/Pragmatics
Terms of endearment and anger in Levantine Arabic:
Praying for and against someone 243
Mohammad A. Mohammad
Language acquisition
On the L1 development of final consonant clusters in Cairene Arabic 263
Marwa Ragheb and Stuart Davis
Neurolinguistics
Neurocognitive modeling of the two language varieties in Arabic Diglossia 285
Reem Khamis-Dakwar and Karen Froud
Index 303
Introduction
Diversity and innovation in Arabic Linguistics
Reem Khamis-Dakwar and Karen Froud
It is an ambitious mission to incorporate studies from different domains of Arabic
linguistics in one volume. Since its inception, the Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics
Series has provided a vehicle for the contributions of Arabic linguists to the study
of human languages. This volume highlights the growth of Arabic linguistics and
showcases the diversity of approaches that is driving forward this ever-evolving
field. Fittingly, these papers were selected from the Arabic Linguistics Society An-
nual Meeting that was held in New York City in March, 2012 – the most diverse
and innovative city in the world, hosting the foremost scholars and thinkers in this
most varied and pioneering of fields.
We believe that the study of Arabic linguistics is on the cusp of exciting chang-
es that will bring greater attention, collaboration, and recognition of the contribu-
tions made within this field to the broader study of human language. We are proud
to be associated with this volume, which represents a collection of unique, varied,
and wholly innovative approaches that will contribute to this emerging and evolv-
ing dynamic field of study.
The key notions woven throughout this volume are innovation and diversity.
The structure of this volume in itself represents an innovation, and we have care-
fully selected papers that reflect the diversity of approaches, opinions and analyses.
Alongside several groundbreaking papers in key aspects of Arabic morphosyntax,
semantics, phonology, and sociolinguistics, we are also pleased to include repre-
sentative contributions from language acquisition and neurolinguistics. The ap-
plication of these disciplines to the study of Arabic is growing, and the inclusion of
papers from these fields is an indication of the importance of innovation for the
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics. The juxtaposition of papers from emerging dis-
ciplines with those from more established approaches illustrates innovation and
diversity across domains; each of the contributions to this volume also demon-
strates the kind of within-domain innovation that has brought the study of Arabic
linguistics to its present stage.
 Reem Khamis-Dakwar and Karen Froud
The volume is structured as follows. This introduction provides an overview
and identifies some unifying themes between the papers. The first two papers are
contributions from keynote speakers and field leaders, Jamal Ouhalla and Enam
Al-Wer. These are followed by the Syntax papers, which represent a wide range
of approaches and themes including perspectives from Optimality Theory and
generative grammar, tackling issues including negation, prosody, agreement,
and cliticization. The contributions from Phonology are next, including an ex-
amination of the vexed question of secondary stress in Arabic and a view of the
interface between derivation and inflection. The next contribution is from So-
ciolinguistics and illustrates the application of a new kind of analysis to an ex-
amination of contact influences. This is followed by a paper on the Semantics
and Pragmatics of terms of endearment and anger, which includes an analysis of
these notoriously complex expressions. The penultimate paper in this volume
presents some new data from child language acquisition, revealing the complex-
ity and diversity of acquisition of geminates and consonant clusters. Finally, we
are pleased to include a paper describing approaches to the neurolinguistics of
Arabic, which we hope offers a new direction for the study of Arabic languages
at a different level of abstraction.
In the first of our keynote papers, Lexical change and the nature of lexicon and
word derivation, a narrowly defined linguistic phenomenon is used to focus a dis-
cussion that has implications for the very nature of human language. The article
examines grammaticalization of motion participles such as Moroccan ġadi and
Levantine rayћ into future tense markers on a par with English going to (e.g. Bill is
going to go to college after all). Ouhalla shows how “semantic bleaching”, the pro-
cess whereby meaning components and arguments are diachronically removed
from representations of the motion particle, provides insight into the internal
structure of the human grammar. He derives a view of the language system as
including both a Lexicon, that likely consists of abstract and morphosyntactic uni-
versal primitives, and a Vocabulary, that is, the repository of language-specific as-
sociations between phonological, semantic, and morphosyntactic features. On
such a view, Lexical items are only (phonologically) realized to the extent that they
spell out bundles of abstract features within a syntactic frame. This innovative
work represents an extension of Ouhalla’s (2012) proposals and has implications
not only for adding to our sparse knowledge of gramaticalization and functional
morpheme derivation in Arabic but also for our understanding of the processes
and representations involved in human language.
In our second keynote paper, Yod-dropping in b-imperfect verb forms in Am-
man, Enam Al-Wer provides a framework for the discussion of sociolinguistic
phenomena through fascinating data on yod dropping from Amman, where the
spoken dialect has been examined over the past three generations. Al-Wer’s
Introduction 
groundbreaking work on dialect formation and contact has already revealed hith-
erto unsuspected systematicity in vowel shift and has pointed to the importance of
adolescents and females in dialect individuation. Through the ongoing ‘Amman
Project’, a large-scale sociolinguistic investigation of the formation of the Amman
dialect (see Al-Wer, 2007), we are provided with a unique test case for current
theories on dialect formation and contact.
Having set the stage for consideration of linguistic and sociolinguistic phe-
nomena in Arabic with these two papers, each of which emphasizes the broader
contributions of Arabic linguistics for the study of human language, we turn to
papers on syntax. Hoyt provides data on negative concord, a phenomenon well
known in Romance but hitherto little-documented in Arabic. In Levantine, nega-
tive concord can be a long-distance dependency, in which an “n-word” inside a
subordinate clause can be licensed by negation in a higher clause. Though this
long-distance licensing appears at first to be an idiosyncratic property of certain
verbs, Hoyt’s novel analysis – a multi-dimensional approach that incorporates
structural and acoustic analyses alongside a wealth of comparative cross-linguistic
data – shows that this phenomenon really derives from constrained interactions
between syntactic and prosodic constituency.
Similarly, the paper by Benmamoun and Al-Asbahi presents some unusual
data that appear superficially anomalous and shows that the observed pattern can
really be derived through a deeper understanding of the underlying processes. They
review negation data from San’ani Arabic, a process that depends on cliticization,
and contrast this unusual pattern with data from Moroccan Arabic, where negation
involves head movement. Through a detailed analysis of the negation structures in
various Arabic varieties, they derive an account for San’ani Arabic negation as natu-
rally arising through parameterization. In the spirit of the grammaticalization
hypothesis described by Ouhalla (2012 and current volume), Benmamoun and Al-
Asbahi also propose an account of cliticization as a possible mechanism for the
diachronic emergence of the negative laysa in Classical Arabic.
As pointed out by Benmamoun and Al-Asbahi (this volume, p.xx), “Arabic
varieties provide fertile grounds for testing current linguistic approaches.” Soltan’s
paper on negation in Cairene Arabic rises to this challenge, making use of Arabic
data to evaluate the utility of current formulations for relative positioning of T and
Neg heads in the functional domain, deriving a new perspective in the process.
Theoretical problems associated with syntactic head movement are well known
(for example, the lack of a clear motivation in terms of feature checking, failure to
satisfy the extension condition, violation of the condition on chain uniformity, the
so-called “traffic rule” problem, and the fact that head movement does not have
semantic effects at LF; all discussed in Chomsky, 2001, inter alia). With respect to
negation, Soltan argues for an account that is morphological rather than strictly