Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics: Papers from the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics. Volume X: Salt Lake City, 1996

305 Pages·1997·24.02 MB·English

by  Mushira Eid

PERSPECTIVES ON ARABIC LINGUISTICS X
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 (Edinburgh)
Hans-Heinrich Lieb (Berlin); Ernst Pulgram (Ann Arbor, Mich.)
E. Wyn Roberts (Vancouver, B.C.); Danny Steinberg (Tokyo)
Volume 153
Mushira Eid and Robert R. Ratcliffe (eds)
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics X
PERSPECTIVES ON
ARABIC LINGUISTICS X
PAPERS FROM
THE TENTH ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM ON
ARABIC LINGUISTICS
Edited by
MUSHIRA EID
The University of Utah, Salt Lake City
ROBERT R. RATCLIFFE
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Tokyo
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Mushira Eid and Robert R. Ratcliffe (eds)
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics X
Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. Series IV, Current issues in
linguistic theory, ISSN 0304-0763 ; v. 153,
ISBN 90 272 3658 5 (Eur.) / 1-55619-869-8 (US) (alk. paper)
© Copyright 1997 - 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 75577 · 1070 AN Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O.Box 27519 · Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 · USA
Table of Contents
Foreword vii
Introduction 1
I. Discourse and Syntactic Perspectives
Remarks on Focus in Standard Arabic 9
Jamal Ouhalla
Definiteness Realization and Function in Palestinian Arabic 47
Dina Belyayeva
Case Properties of Nominalization DPs in Classical Arabic 69
Arthur Stepanov
II. Morphological Perspectives
Underspecification of Lexical Entries for Arabic Verbs 93
Mark S. LeTourneau
Plural Formation in Arabic 123
Ali Idrissi
Prosodic Templates in a Word-Based Morphological Analysis
of Arabic 147
Robert R. Ratcliffe
The Suppletive Imperative of Arabic "Come" 173
David Testen
ΠΙ. Phonetic and Phonological Perspectives
On an Optimality-Theoretic Account of Epenthesis and Syncope
in Arabic Dialects 191
Bushra Adrian Zawaydeh
Acoustics of Pharyngealization vs. Uvularization Harmony 215
Kimary N. Shahin
Phonological Variation in Syrian Arabic: Correlation with
Gender, Age, and Education 239
Jamil Daher
IV. Perspectives on the Acquisition of Arabic
Arabic Speakers and Parasitic Gaps 273
Naomi Bolotin
Stress Prosody and Speech Segmentation: Evidence from
Moroccan Arabic 283
Younes Mourchid
Index of Subjects 293
FOREWORD
The Tenth Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics was held March 1-
3, 1996, at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. The symposium was
sponsored by the Arabic Linguistics Society, the University of Utah's
College of Humanities, Middle East Center, Department of Languages and
and Literature, and Program in Linguistics, and by Brigham Young
University.
A total of twenty papers were presented at the symposium; of these,
twelve are published in this volume. The papers presented 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 their final acceptance for publication.
The transcription of all Arabic materials in the body of the papers, unless
otherwise specified, 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.
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. I am indebted to Tessa Hauglid, who has served as assistant
editor as well as copy editor for this volume. I also thank Linda Adams for
her assistance in organizing the symposium.

INTRODUCTION
Mushira Eid
University of Utah
Robert R. Ratcliffe
The Prefectural University of Kumamoto and
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Focus and topic feature prominently in the first section of this
volume. These have at times been considered discourse, or 'beyond-
the-sentence', phenomena and at times syntactic phenomena. The first
two papers in this section deal with focus and topic, but from different
perspectives. Whereas Ouhalla presents a formal, syntax-based
approach, Belyayeva takes a discourse-based approach in her study.
Jamal Ouhalla addresses an array of issues related to focus in
Standard Arabic: the distinction between focus and topic, focus
marking, the grammatical basis of focus including a discussion of focus
in different syntactic structure (e.g., negatives, interrogatives, and
verbs). Ouhalla's analysis is based on the idea that Structural
Descriptions (SD) come specified with information expressed in the
form of features. Focus phrases are, therefore, assigned an abstract
feature [+f], which is also assigned to a functional head in the sentence
structure. These features are subject to a more general condition on
recoverability by which abstract features and null categories must be
identified. Ouhalla discusses three mechanisms in Standard Arabic for
the identification of these features: tonic accent (a phonetic property),
focus markers (a morphological property), as well as spec-head