Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics: Papers from the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics. Volume IV: Detroit, Michigan 1990

291 Pages·1992·22.04 MB·English

by  Ellen Broselow

PERSPECTIVES ON ARABIC LINGUISTICS IV
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); John E. Joseph (College Park, Md.)
Hans-Heinrich Lieb (Berlin); Ernst Pulgram (Ann Arbor, Mich.)
E. Wyn Roberts (Vancouver, B.C.); Danny Steinberg (Tokyo)
PERSPECTIVES ON
ARABIC LINGUISTICS IV
PAPERS FROM THE FOURTH ANNUAL
SYMPOSIUM ON ARABIC LINGUISTICS
Edited by
ELLEN BROSELOW
State University of New York
Stony Brook, N.Y.
MUSHIRA EID
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah
JOHN MCCARTHY
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, Mass.
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
1992
Library of Congress Catalog Serial Number: 91-641663
ISSN 0304-0763
ISBN 90 272 3582 1 (Eur.)/l-55619-140-5 (US)
© Copyright 1992 - 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 1
I. ARABIC DIALECTS: IMPLICATIONS FOR GENERAL
LINGUISTICS
Parametric Variation in Arabic Dialect Phonology 7
Ellen Broselow
Vowel Shortening in Two Arabic Dialects 47
Mahasen Abu-Mansour
Extra-Arabic Affiliations of k-Yemeni 77
David Testen
Shifting Boundaries: The effect of MSA on dialect convergence
in Baghdad 91
Farida Abu-Haidar
Pronouns, Questions, and Agreement 107
Mushira Eid
Cairene Arabic Auxiliaries and the Category AUX 143
John Eisele
II. SOCIOLINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVES
How Different are Men and Women: Palatalization in Cairo 169
Niloofar Haeri
Vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
A Sociolinguistic Description of (u:) in Korba Arabic: Defining
linguistic variables in contact situations and relic areas 181
Keith Walters
Code-Mixing in the Speech of Arabic-English Bilinguals 219
Ahmad Atawneh
III. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
Variable Agreement with Nonhuman Controllers in Classical
and Modern Standard Arabic 245
R. Kirk Belnap & Osama Shabaneh
Morphosyntactic Analysis in Al-Jumalfii l-nahw: Discourse
structure and metalanguage 263
Karin Ryding
Index of Subjects 279
FOREWORD
On March 2-3, 1990 the Fourth Annual Symposium on Arabic
Linguistics was held at Wayne State University in Detroit. The
symposium was sponsored by the Arabic Linguistic Society, Wayne
State University's Department of Near Eastern and Asian Studies,
Office of the Dean of Liberal Arts, and Linguistics Program, together
with the University of Utah's College of Humanities, Department of
Languages and Literature, and Linguistics Program.
A total of 16 papers were presented at the symposium; of these, 11
are published in this volume. The papers presented at the symposium
were selected on the basis of an anonymous review of abstracts
submitted to the Program Committee. The papers inlcuded 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
follows the International Phonetic Alphabet or standard equivalents.
The Arabic emphatics, however, are represented by a dot underneath
the symbol, and long vowels as sequences of two vowels. The
transliteration of Arabic names and titles follows accepted formats,
with some simplification in the use of diacritics. We have used ' and '
for hamza (glottal stop) and 'ayn (pharyngeal approximant),
respectively. In quoted materials we followed the original text.
The preparation and printing of the final manuscript was done
using facilities available at the Middle East Center of the University of
Utah, Salt Lake City. We would also like to acknowledge the editorial
assistance of Eric Olson, a student of Linguistics and Arabic
Linguistics at the University of Utah.

INTRODUCTION
Ellen Broselow
Mushira Eid
John McCarthy
This volume includes papers from the parasession on the study of
Arabic dialects and their implications for general linguistics, as well
as papers from the general session. Because the Arabic dialects are
similar in many ways, a study of the ways in which they differ can
help isolate precisely the range of permissible interlinguistic variation
(i.e., the 'parameters' of universal grammar). While a number of the
papers in the first section focus on the contribution of dialect studies
to a theory of possible cross-dialectal and cross-linguistic variation,
others focus on individual dialects, thus providing data and analyses
that can further contribute to our understanding of this type of
variation.
In the first paper (and the keynote address to the symposium),
Broselow presents a study of syllabic phonlogy in Cairene, Sudanese,
Makkan, and Iraqi Arabic. Broselow argues that syllable bimoraicity
is a fundamental organizing principle in all these dialects, with
phonological processes of various kinds functioning to realize this
principle. Apparent variation in the directionality of syllable-
dependent operations, she argues, actually follows from the option
allowed in some dialects of assigning a consonant to a syllable nucleus.
The choice of this option determines several apparently independent
features of dialect phonology.