Benmamoun Elabbas Benmamoun – författare

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.

The papers in this volume address core areas in contemporary Arabic linguistics: syntax, phonology, and variation studies. The papers in the syntax sections address different topics from the perspective of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995) and subsequent work. The topics in this section are adverbs and adjectives, resumptive pronouns, gapping and VP deletion, and the morphosyntax of reciprocals. The phonology section consists of a contribution on coarticulation effects of uvular(ized) segments, and of a paper on pharyngealization and uvularization within the framework of Optimality Theory. The sociolinguistics papers in the third section of the volume represent three important lines of inquiry: discourse level variation, stylistic variation, and diachronic variation.

The papers in this volume deal with various topics in Arabic Linguistics. Most of the papers focus on new issues and introduce new empirical generalizations that haven''t been studied before within the context of Arabic linguistics. The syntax and morphosyntax papers explore issues ranging from the nature of extraction strategies to various types of Construct State representations and the proper analysis of the distribution of the nominal, adjectival and verbal mophological features. The computational linguistics papers focus on the challenge posed by the non-concatenative nature of Arabic morphology. The authors illustrate how their programs can handle Arabic morphology. The papers in morpho-phonology and historical linguistics deal with the development of the Arabic complementizer system and the empirical and theoretical problems that arise in the context of hypocoristic formation in Arabic. The sociolinguistics papers take up the issues of sociolinguistic variation as they pertain to the phenomenon of diglossia and regional uses of the Standard variety of Arabic.