Arabic Linguistics

Aims: This study focuses on heritage speakers' ability to use their Arabic varieties and English in the construction of narratives of personal experience. This is critical because English, Colloquial Arabic (CA), and Standard Arabic (SA) are part of the sociolinguistic reality of the families and communities in which many heritage Arabic speakers live. Design: The study compares and contrastes heritage speakers' Arabic and English narratives with respect to codes, registers, and functions in the narratives. Data and analysis: Fifteen Arabic and 15 English narratives from five participants, fluent in Arabic and English, were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. Findings: The results reveal that, despite their fluency in their heritage language, respondents lack the sociolinguistic competence to socially and pragmatically deploy CA and SA appropriately in their narratives. In the Arabic narratives, respondents alternated frequently between CA and SA, but they were not always able to maintain the asymmetrical functions of CA and SA. English was used mainly as a compensation strategy, yet participants were able to integrate contextually appropriate English registers in discourse. In the English narratives, participants switched parsimoniously to Arabic for fillers and culturally specific terms and expressions. Moreover, they displayed a greater register control based on the events in their narratives. Originality: This is one of few studies focusing on the sociolinguistic competence of heritage Arabic speakers. It is the first study to examine the distribution and functions of Arabic varieties and English in personal narratives rendered in Arabic and English. Implications: The study indicates that a full understanding of heritage language acquisition requires an evaluation of the sociolinguistic aspects of language use. Heritage speakers are influenced by contextual factors and by the lack of a community of practice, elements that are key in understanding their sociolinguistic competence.

In recent work, idioms have in many traditions been assimilated to the study of metaphor. An idiom such as 'spill the beans' is understood against the conceptual metaphors, THE MIND IS A CONTAINER and IDEAS ARE ENTITIES for instance. Such a treatment implies that idioms are processed online, calling up in their production the conceptual metaphors which support them. In this article an alternative treatment is put forward whereby idioms are lexical in nature. The argument has two parts. First, the constituent collocates of idioms share a number of key grammatical properties with non-idiomatic lexemes. Even in their idiomatic usage they must in some sense be normal lexemes. Secondly, at the same time, idioms are shown to be distinctive in terms of their discourse properties, in particular the fact of idiomaticity restricting the referentiality of idiomatic nouns. Drawing broadly on ideas developed within psycholinguistic treatments of idiomaticity, a model of idioms is developed whereby idioms are seen as lexically compositional against a rich polysemy of their stipulated, constituent lexemes. While, it may be inferred, metonymic and meta-phoric associations led to the lexical polysemy of the constituent collocates, metonymy and metaphor play no necessary role in their online production and processing. The argument is developed on the basis of a detailed discussion of idioms in Nigerian Arabic. The data derives from a large, oral corpus (400,000 words), in which the conventional nature of idiomaticity is underscored by the quantitative preponderance of idiomatic meanings among basic body part nouns such as ṛaas 'head' and gaḷb 'heart'.

The present article aims at questioning the status of the šāwi dialect of the Bani ʕ Abbād tribe by providing a new analysis of the main distinctive phonological, morphological, and syntactical traits which may hint at dialect mixing. The data provided by the field research, based on a functional framework that relies on descriptive linguistics and a typological approach, show that this dialect is deeply affected by a koineizing tendency due to increasing contacts with the populations of the neighboring areas (especially ʕ Ammān and Salṭ) which, in turn, leads to the gradual loss of its authentic features. Finally, this paper discusses whether the dialect of the Bani ʕ Abbād should still be considered as belonging to the yigūl group (recently renamed Central Bedouin ygūlu) of the Syro-Mesopotamian sheep-raising tribes or if a new typology of mixed type dialects should eventually be adopted for the dialects displaying important markers of both Bedouin and sedentary types.

The aim of this paper is to explore loanwords in Hadrami Arabic (Yemen). Most of these words, which are now diminishing due to the social and economical development in the region, reflect some stage of bilingualism when the Hadram's (natives of Hadramawt, Yemen) migrated to different parts of the world. The donor languages range from the tongues of the Indian subcontinent to the languages of the Malay archipelago, to Swahili and English. These loans are confined, as one would expect, to certain registers such as food or modern technology. The language contact resulted in different morphological and phonological processes and examples are given on how such loanwords became integrated in the dialect to the extent that some eminent folk-poets did not hesitate in using them in their poetry. In the appendix, a list of loanwords is given with their meanings and origins.

Learners of English may have problems or make mistakes when engaging in phatic communion, as its use requires a meta-pragmatic awareness of a wide range of complex and subtle issues, such as when and with whom to engage in it, the underlying reasons to do so, the types of phatic tokens that may be exchanged, the topics that such tokens may address, or potential effects achievable. Although many didactic materials implicitly deal with some elements related to phatic communion, they do not include it as an independent topic, nor do they neatly define it, distinguish its different manifestations or address its socio-cultural peculiarities. For this reason, this paper suggests a methodological proposal to teach the pragmatics of phatic communion and raise learners' meta-pragmatic awareness. Based on an approach to teach the pragmatics of specific L2 aspects , this proposal integrates relevant findings about phatic communion from pragmatics and other neighbouring disciplines, combines different approaches to teach intercultural pragmatic issues in class and includes tasks.

In Moroccan Arabic it is widely accepted that short vowels are mostly elided, resulting in consonant clusters and consonant geminates. In this paper we present evidence from our exploratory timing study that challenges this widely accepted principle. We work with minimal pairs of singleton consonants vs. geminates (e.g. /bka/ vs. /bəkka/) that reveals a presence of a vowel insertion between the clusters in word initial position in singleton cases. The length of the vowel insertion (epenthetic vowel) and silent pause of the stop consonant is greater than of a noise material. The epenthetic vowel is present in isolated words and in sentence context too. In this paper we also provide phonetic correlates in the minimal pairs -between epenthetic vowel and lexical vowel, between singleton and geminate consonants, and contrast these with other Arabic dialect phonetic timing studies.

The Arabic tour kāna … sa-/sawfa yafʿalu is frequently encountered in contemporary Arabic press as well as in novels. Recent grammars of this state of language seem to oscillate between three distinct values which are conditional (« il ferait/he would do »), periphrastic imperfect (« il allait faire/he was going to do ») and past conditional (« il allait faire/he was going to do »). Yet it is the latter two interpretations that appear most often chosen with a counterfactual reading. This article proposes then to show, from a large corpus of contemporary Arabic press, but also from insights from French linguistics, how the Arabic tour kāna … sa-/sawfa yafʿalu, understood in Arabic linguistics as a future in the past, is not, like his French counterpart, only liable to a counterfactual reading. Specifically, this article will show how this Arabic structure is able to “say what did not happen”, to “say what irrevocably happened” and to “say what was possible to happen whether it happened or not”, with particular emphasis on the agreemental identity of such a turn, proving that many of its uses are in fact loans from European languages.

Le tour kāna … sa-/sawfa yafʿalu se rencontre fréquemment dans la presse arabe contemporaine et les romans. Les grammaires récentes de cet état de langue semblent osciller entre trois valeurs distinctes que sont conditionnel présent (« il ferait/he would do »), imparfait périphrastique (« il allait faire/he was going to do ») et conditionnel passé (« il aurait fait/he would have done »). C’est pourtant ces deux dernières interprétations qui semblent le plus souvent retenues avec une lecture contrefactuelle. Cet article se propose de montrer, à partir d’un large corpus de presse arabe contemporaine, mais aussi à partir de réflexions tirées de la linguistique du français, comment le tour arabe kāna … sa-/sawfa yafʿalu, compris en linguistique de l’arabe comme un ultérieur du passé, n’est pas, à l’instar de son homologue français, uniquement passible d’une lecture contrefactuelle. Plus précisément, il s’agira de montrer et de comprendre comment ce tour arabe est en mesure de “dire ce qui ne s’est pas produit”, de “dire ce qui s’est irrévocablement produit” et de “dire ce qu’il était possible qu’il se produise, que cela se soit produit, ou non”, en insistant notamment sur l’aspect concordanciel d’un tel tour, prouvant que nombre de ses emplois seraient en fait des calques depuis les langues européennes.

In Arabic grammar the term MASDAR is applied to a variety of noun forms derived from verb and other stems according to a set of partially regular but largely irregular morphological patterns (Ryding 2005). Three deverbal masdar forms allow complex event interpretations in which the verbal argument structure is inherited, but at the same time, they display a range of nominal properties. In both transformational and LFG treatments, these phrases have been assumed to have both verbal and nominal syntax. We propose instead that verbal functions be permitted inside what is categorially an NP from top to bottom.

This chapter serves as an introduction to the Handbook, as it lays the foundations of sociolinguistics as a subfield of linguistics, which is valuable in the theorising of language as a natural human faculty. The study of language variation and change has transcended sociolinguistics and is now of interest to syntacticians and phonologists as well. We present Arabic sociolinguistics as a direct descendent of general sociolinguistics, and in the European tradition, also of Arabic dialectology. We introduce the history of Arabic sociolinguistics and the important developments it has undergone throughout the last five decades.

This research is divided into two interlinked parts. The first part reviews literature on the diglossia and variability of the Arabic language and investigates how mutual intelligibility is achieved in informal conversations between speakers of different Arabic dialects. 11 conversations were recorded between speakers of 12 Arabic dialects. Instances of borrowing from Modern Standard Arabic were observed and analysed. The participants were also interviewed after the recorded conversations in order to get more insight into the listening comprehension strategies that they applied to achieve intelligibility. The results show that the native speakers tend to rely mostly on their native dialect in cross-dialectal interaction with a much smaller number of borrowings from Modern Standard Arabic in comparison with previous studies. A number of listening strategies were observed to be used in order to aid intelligibility. These strategies included making use of the context, ignoring non-content words and making use of their linguistic knowledge and the root and pattern system in Arabic as a frame of reference in comprehending unfamiliar cognates. The analysis also showed that dialect familiarity has a major role in aiding comprehension between the native speakers of different Arabic dialects.
The second part, first, examines the needs of learning Arabic as a second language in Higher Education, then presents a case study that tests the advanced Arabic learners’ level of cognate recognition in unfamiliar dialects and whether explicit strategy teaching and lexical training can improve their dialectal lexical comprehension. Five final year university students of Arabic with an advanced level in MSA and exposure to a dialect participated in this study. Pre and post-tests of dialectal listening comprehension were administered. The results of a higher score in the post-test confirmed that the explicit strategy training helped the Arabic students to achieve better comprehension of cognates in unfamiliar dialects.

Word-order in Akkadian is generally described as SOV, and although other word-orders than SOV are visible in texts when they are examined individually, trends over an entire corpus remain difficult to establish. Buccellati (1996: 396) recommended that to make word order trends visible, a representative body of texts would have to be tested statistically. In this respect, Old Babylonian omen texts constitute a useful corpus to investigate for trends. In this corpus, protases and apodoses regularly begin with a nominative, a prepositional phrase/adverb, or an accusative. Old Babylonian omens in the YOS 10 collection are particularly noteworthy for the recurrence of apodoses that not only begin with an accusative object but also contain a suffixed pronoun that resumes the sentence-initial accusative and is always attached to the verb. To discuss word-order trends in Old Babylonian omens and this specific type of apodosis construction, the present article begins a three-part series that will present non-SOV sentence structures in protases and apodoses, beginning with the accusative-initial sentence. This discussion will focus on the structure of accusative-initial apodoses in YOS 10 omen texts and their function. Linguistic studies, both ancient and modern, describe the accusative object as a constituent that carries new information in the sentence, in contrast to the nominative subject that carries old or shared information. On the basis of the value of the accusative, accusative-initial sentences can not only be analysed as focus, but can also be viewed as sentences that communicate new information first via the accusative. Their function is to contrast nominative-initial sentences that communicate old or shared information first, via the nominative.

From a comparative linguistic perspective the question whether or not proto-Semitic had a functioning case system similar to that in Classical Arabic does not readily yield an unequivocal answer. It is generally agreed that there are Semitic languages or sub-language families for which a proto-case system is plausible, but equally, there are others where such a system did not exist. The issue is, arguably, more interesting for Arabic than for any other Semitic language, since Arabic is a language whose contemporary varieties totally lack morphological case, but whose classical variety had a case system. In this paper I reiterate arguments I have made before for the indeterminacy of knowing whether proto-Arabic had a case system, embedding it in an expanded comparative look at two Semitic languages, Amorite and Epigraphic (Old) South Arabian. As a spinoff of this comparative discussion one can contemplate ways in which the case system such as described by Sibawaih was instrumentalized out of a system which was not necessarily the system he himself described. Giving greater due to comparative linguistic arguments than is customary practice in Semitic studies opens the door to a consideration of a number of important aspects of Arabic linguistic history which have hitherto been neglected.

From surveys made on the Internet, in newspapers and in novels written in Modern Standard Arabic, this article shows the existence of other forms of negation in the future than that of lan + subjunctive. It demonstrates that the so called MSA grammar books are, once again, descriptively inadequate when facing the reality of the texts. While arguing for a renewal of the teaching of the MSA grammar, this article shows that these forms are actually much older than it appears and proposes assumptions to analyze the conditions for their emergence. More specifically, the article proposes after Larcher and on the basis of non synonymy to see in the joint existence of several forms of negations in the future a probable reorganization of the negation system where, on logical and pragmatic bases, the difference would be made between a descriptive negation on one hand and a modal negation (= denial) on the other.

The starting-point for this article is the statement made by al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363) that the Arabic word tawriya has the original form (aṣl) *wawriya, corresponding to the pattern (wazn) tafʿila, in which the first radical wāw has been replaced by the segment /t/. I aim to shed light on this derivation postulated by al-Ṣafadī by investigating the major sources of grammatical, morphological, and etymological studies which were then available to him. I analyse the sources chronologically to arrive at a better understanding of developments in morphology in the period from the first authors to al-Ṣafadī's contemporaries. I show that al-Ṣafadī was influenced by the disquisitions of the two main schools of Arabic thought on grammar: those of Baṣra and Kūfa. He was influenced in particular regarding the question of how to attribute the patterns to some words like tawrāt, with the Baṣran grammarians positing that it is fawʿala, and those belonging to the Kūfa school maintaining that it is according to the pattern tafʿala. Moreover, and precisely because some scholars assume that tawriya and tawrāt have a common etymology, al-Ṣafadī postulates that, besides having the same root, they also share the same original form, meaning that both words underwent the same phonological and morphological mutations.

Inhabiting a space or dwelling has been a debatable terminology in architectural theory & practice. Martin Heidegger's conference paper "Building dwelling thinking" is a major philosophical work that influenced architects in the 20th century. The philosopher interpreted the word as an etymological archaeologist, working on the word's essential meaning until he related it to, Being-in-this-world and Being-towards-death. In this research, we examine the term "dwelling" through the Arabic parables "Maskan" and "Manzel" to reach a more comprehensive understanding that will unveil its essential meaning in its local cultural context. Moreover, we base our research on a survey answered in Lebanon, on the meaning of the word Maskan in its contemporary form, while linking it to Heidegger's etymological findings. Our results explicitly an Arabic term used that describes a different phenomenon in other cultures.

On January 14, 2011, Zayn al-'Ābidīn Bin 'Alī resigned, left Tunisia and took refuge in Saudi Arabia following the revolts born in Sīdi Būzīd after the suicide of Bū-'Azīzī. The Arab Spring in Tunisia was not a popular uprising perpetrated by the lower class and the unemployed young people: the committees of the lawyers and the magistrates who joined the protests, proved the active participation of the middle class. However, the Revolution did not alleviate the popular unrest, and it did not reduce the social imbalances. The diastratic varieties, already existing before the Revolution, are the linguistic reflection of the social situation. After 2011 the main actors of the protests, proceeding from the lowest and youngest class, came back to the Ḥūma, the ghetto, in which anger and frustration flourish. The description of the life in the Ḥūma, has become the main topic of many songs written by the new generation of Tunisian artists who sing in the slang of the lower class. Despite they proceed from the upper class, they have become the spokesmen of the malaise that hovers in the poor neighborhoods. Guerrero (2012) analysed linguistically Rāyǝs lǝ-Blād, a song by the Tunisian rapper El Général, appeared on internet on February 8th, 2011, few days before the escape of Bǝn ԑAlī. Rāyǝs lǝ-Blād is an example of the artistic denunciation of the political oppression and the social degradation. The songs of artists such as Kafon, Hamzaoui Med Amin and Balti, which appeared after the Revolution instead, are not acts of protest, they just represent the ordinary life of the ūlād ǝl-Ḥūma in the ghetto. What linguistic dynamics are put in place by these singers? After a historical-etymological reconstruction related to the word Ḥūma, it will be shown how this group of artists practiced, on the one hand, the divergence with respect to the prestigious variety of the capital, on the other, the convergence towards the language of the tunisian poorest class. Abstract Il 14 gennaio 2011, Zayn al-'Ābidīn Bin 'Alī, lascia la carica di Presidente della Repubblica, abbandona la Tunisia e trova rifugio in Arabia Saudita a seguito delle rivolte, nate nella Provincia di Sīdi Būzīd dopo il suicidio di Bū-'Azīzī. La Primavera araba tunisina del 2011 non è stata una sommossa popolare perpetrata dalla classe meno abbiente e dai giovani disoccupati: i comitati di avvocati e magistrati usciti in corteo per unirsi alle proteste, hanno dato prova della partecipazione attiva della classe media. Tuttavia, la "Rivoluzione dei gelsomini" non è stata in grado né di lenire il malcontento popolare, né di diminuire le disparità sociali. Tale situazione è riscontrabile, dal punto di vista linguistico, nelle varietà diastratiche, esistenti già prima della Rivoluzione e acuitesi nel periodo immediatamente successivo: i primi e principali attori delle rivolte, procedenti dalla classe più svantaggiata e anagraficamente più giovane, sono tornati a vivere nel degrado della Ḥūma, il ghetto, in cui serpeggiano la rabbia e la frustrazione, che hanno trovato espressione nel linguaggio. La descrizione della vita nella Ḥūma, è diventato il tema ricorrente di una serie di canzoni scritte ed interpretate da artisti tunisini di nuova generazione, che attraverso quello slang identitario della classe meno abbiente, si sono fatti portavoce artistici del malessere che aleggia nei quartieri poveri. Guerrero (2012), in un'analisi linguistica di Rāyǝs lǝ-Blād, canzone del rapper tunisino El Général, comparsa in rete l'8 febbraio 2011, e rivolta direttamente al dittatore, ha mostrato un esempio artistico di denuncia dell'oppressione politica e del degrado sociale pochi giorni prima della fuga di Bǝn ԑAlī in Arabia Saudita. Le canzoni di artisti come Kafon, Hamzaoui Med Amin e Balti, comparse successivamente alla Rivoluzione invece, non si presentano come un atto di protesta, ma semplicemente come la rappresentazione canora di giornate di vita ordinaria degli ūlād ǝl-Ḥūma nel ghetto. Ma quali dinamiche linguistiche vengono messe in atto dai citati cantautori che, nonostante procedano da un retaggio sociale e culturale agiato, si fanno portavoce artistici del malessere che aleggia nei quartieri più poveri? Dopo una ricostruzione storico-etimologica relativa al termine Ḥūma, si mostrerà come questo gruppo di artisti pratichi, da un lato, un processo di divergenza rispetto alla prestigiosa varietà della capitale, dall'altro, di convergenza verso il linguaggio della Tunisia disagiata, sia a livello fonologico che di commutazione di codice.

Written contemporary Arabic is often perceived as only the lexically modernized form of classical Arabic. However, significant examples of syntactic evolutions are not lacking (conditional systems, sawfa lā, sawfa lan, etc.) To show the evolution of written contemporary Arabic, mainly within the Arabic newspapers, this article will look at two cases of new constructions, even impossible and faulty with respect to the canons of the classical language. It is the combinations in sawfa when it is anteposed as well to sa-yafʿalu, therefore already a future form, as to faʿala, so a past while sawfa is a marker of future intervening only in front of a muḍāriʿ. These evolutions, perceived by the followers of a frozen Arabic language and other deaf and blind ayatollahs of the language as only faults, are nevertheless meaningful.

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Suite au colloque qui s'est tenu à Aix-en-Provence en juin 2015, intitulé « Matériaux pour l'établissement de grammaires descrip-tives du fuṣḥā écrit contemporain. Entre nor-me(s) et pratiques au cours des 50 dernières années », ce recueil propose d'ouvrir la ré-flexion sur la langue arabe écrite contempo-raine et, plus particulièrement, sur ce qui est réputé dans le monde arabe comme étant du fuṣḥā écrit contemporain (Contemporary Written Fuṣḥā-CWF). À partir de données nouvelles, en termes de faits de langue, provenant d'un travail sur corpus écrits (littérature, presse, blogs, etc.) issus de divers supports (papier ou Internet), ce recueil propose l'analyse de quelques aspects de cet arabe écrit contemporain. L'objectif est de rendre compte des évolutions notables de cette variété de langue, qui inté-ressent au premier chef la syntaxe, mais qui relèvent tout autant d'évolutions sémantiques et d'usages sociolinguistiques.

In 1983 the eminent Egyptian linguist Tammām Ḥassān (1918-2011) wrote al-Tamhīd fī iktisāb al-luġa al-ʿarabiyya li-ġayr al-nāṭiqīn bi-hā (Introduction to the Ac- quisition of Arabic Language by Non Arabic Speakers), an essential work in the field of Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language, where he theorised his three-level approach for the acquisition of Arabic language by non Arabs consisting of the first level of knowledge, the second of comprehension and the third, the ‘enjoyment level’ (marḥalat al-istimtāʿ). The aim of the study is to shed light on the third level of language acquisition, which allows learners to detect the beauty of a text and results particularly interesting since it considers certain aspects that characterise Arabic language specificity and legacy such as literary taste (taḏawwuq adabī), stylistic embellishments, figures of speech, etc.

This paper has a twofold goal. First, it attempts to argue that the circumfixal nature of the negative morpheme in Moroccan Arabic supports the existence of impenetrable (cyclic) domains, as in Chomsky's (2001) Derivation by Phase. The second goal is to propose a principled account of the long-standing puzzle of the co-occurrence restriction holding between the post-verbal negative marker {-ʃ} and negative polarity items in an adjacent domain. Applying the precepts of Distributed Morphology, my proposal consists of formalizing this restriction in the form of a general constraint banning the realization of multiple negative morphemes in the same spell-out domain, with the effects being the deletion of the post-verbal negative marker. This is achieved via postulating post-syntactic morphological operations. I show that this prediction is not only borne out in MA but also cross-linguistically.

The main objectives of this article are, on the one hand, to propose a methodology for the study of language change in Classical Arabic, and, on the other hand, to explore the specificities of grammaticalization and language change in this Semitic language. This work analyses the processes of evolution and grammaticalization undergone by the particle ḥattā (‘until’, ‘even’) in Classical Arabic between the 7th and the 20th centuries. 731 examples of ḥattā in fuṣḥā have been examined, using one of the most complete historical corpora of the Arabic language, the HADC, still unpublished. The study considered 30 different variables that have been organized in a relational database. The results are presented in a conceptual map showing the semantic bonds of the five values of ḥattā, as well as the evolutionary pathways of this particle in Classical Arabic. The main conclusions are that fuṣḥā does indeed undergo language change; its evolution is, however, constrained by the Quranic norm and its attachment to the written form. Results also reveal some of the specificities of grammaticalization in Classical Arabic, such as the marked layering, persistence and divergence, or the relevance of including variables such as the origin of the author or the types of text when dealing with language change.

My thesis is an examination of the sentence structures of Old Babylonian omen protases and apodoses, and of their information-value. I used Arabic grammatical theory and seven basic grammatical tools that have remained theoretical constants throughout the development of the tradition to frame my approach. I chose to use Arabic grammatical theory instead of the model provided by standard Assyriological grammars because two areas of research, thriving in Arabic studies and modern linguistics, have not yet been explored or fully brought into Assyriology. The first is the study of sentences structures set within a tripartite model that focuses on the sentence-initial constituent to categorise constructions. The second is the study of the information-value of sentences and of their constituents within a model that anticipates two contrastive sentence types, one that communicates the known or least newsworthy information first, and another that communicates the new or more newsworthy information first. This approach has led me to reassess two current grammatical issues in Assyriology: the identification and function of the nominative casus-pendens, and the frequency and function of the 'accusative' casus pendens. I raised a third question by addressing the issue of terminology to propose that a class of words be coined 'frozen nouns'. The result of my structural and functional analyses was used to give a functionalist reading of Old Babylonian sentences. My aim is to show that Arabic grammatical theory can bring fresh perspective to the study of Old Babylonian grammar, and open new grounds to the study of Old Babylonian omen texts.

The texts collected by Philippe MARÇAIS during the 1950s. The history of negation in the Arabic dialects represents one of the most interesting fields of investigation for linguists, featuring a case of the so-called Jespersen cycle. Fezzani Arabic is in the second stage of the cycle, in which a circumfixal negation has become the most commonly employed pattern. Probably due to its relative isolation, however, it preserves vestiges of the older prefixal negation in at least two contexts unknown to other Arabic dialects.
Similar phenomena are found in a number of distant and unrelated
languages, suggesting a common path of evolution from stage I to stage II of
Jespersen’s cycle.

Among other expressions indicating the obligation is the existential clause lā budda in Arabic. Literally “no way out [to]”, it is often translated into French by “nulle échappatoire [à] (it is necessary [that])” or by the verb devoir, and in English by a verb like have to or by a modal operator like must. In French, devoir traditionally belongs at least to two distinct types of linguistic modalities, the latter being understood in a broad sense as the attitude of the speaker relatively to the propositional content of his statement, and in a restricted and Aristotelian sense as what lies within the realm of possibility and necessity and their negations as to the status of truth of the stated thing. The two types of modality which devoir expresses are traditionally distinguished between radical (also said deontic) and epistemic, to what some authors add the alethic modality. This article aims, within the framework of linguistic modalities in the narrow sense and from a linguistics both contrastive (confronting on one hand that of Arabic and on the other mainly that of French but also that of English) and empirical (based on a written corpus of contemporary written Arabic, journalistic and literary), to show how lā budda expresses what French linguistics designates, within the epistemic modality, as the logical probability. More precisely, this article linguistically assesses the conditions of employment of this existential clause in the sense of alethic, epistemic or deontic devoir. It will then be shown that, compared to French or English, Arabic seems to allow more simply, on syntactical bases, to distinguish deontic and epistemic uses of lā budda as well as some of its alethic uses.

Sībawayh describes /q/, /ṭ/, /b/, /ǧ/ and /d/ as [+voiced +stop] phonemes. In pausal position, these phonemes are subject to qalqala, which can be described as the addition of a schwa [ə], and whose role is the proctection of the [+voiced] feature of these phonemes. In standard Classical Arabic, the pronunciation of these phonemes have evolved (/q/ and /ṭ/ are now realised as [-voiced], and /ǧ/ as [+affricate]). The consistency of qalqala as described by Sībawayh is thus lost, since the Qurʾānic recitation (taǧwīd) rule for qalqala does not fit the current standard pronunciation.
In this study, we trace back a shift in the mere definition of qalqala as early as in al-Mubarrad’s Muqtaḍab that will enable Qurʾānic reciters to later remain blind to the fact that their actual pronunciation of some of these phonemes does not correspond to Sībawayh’s written description.

This article aims to show how, on the status of ʾiʿrāb (inflectional ending, case markers as mood markers), Ibn al-Ḥāğib (d. 646/1249), in the self-commentary he made of his own Kāfiya fī al-naḥw (“The Precis of the syntax”), and even if he explicitly believes in ʾiʿrāb as part of his grammatical tradition, does not any more when explaining some grammatical phenomena. On the contrary he obviously only has in mind the concurrent phenomenon on the inflection ending, namely the pause (waqf), thenceforward put as the only existing at the expense of the inflection ending. That is what shows the analysis of the infraverbal speech of Ibn al-Ḥāğib which contradicts his explicit verbal declaration of belief in ʾiʿrāb

This paper proposes that teacher correction often has very little transfer effect on a student's later language behaviour. It examines reasons for this, and the motivational paradigm within which students operate. The paper argues that student self-correction is more likely to have a measurable long term effect. A mechanism to motivate directed self-correction is therefore proposed. This mechanism involves subtracting marks from assessed essays, and indicating line locations where there is a problem, without however explaining the problem. The procedure gives students the option to recover the lost marks through re-editing and re-submission within a time frame. The system has been tested empirically and found to yield promising results. The method of error evaluation also results in a lower burden of pointless correction for teachers.

This paper investigated the role of cultural context in the reading of utterances. Contrary to the traditional SA paradigm which centers on reading utterances based on the successful performance of the felicity conditions, this study showed, using bargaining data, that unpacking the meaning and the illocutionary force behind an utterance is not simply contingent on speaker's intention or hearer's inference, but partially on the cultural meaning that these utterances have acquired in the Moroccan culture. Utterances, mobilized by interactants, index cultural notions, and in turn, draw part of their meaning from these notions. The interactants' success in performing felicitous and persuasive speech acts was based on, and contingent upon, their knowledge of the local Moroccan culture. It is clear that the invocation of cultural context is essential in analyzing not just the illocutionary force, but also the persuasive aspects of utterances. This invocation becomes especially apparent when we compare the language local sellers use when they converse with local buyers as opposed to the one used with tourists. Therefore, a future comparative study between the bargaining strategies used with local buyers, as opposed to those used by tourists, might yield insightful results and provide further evidence as to the role of culture in contextualizing speech utterances in bargaining.