Search

A categorical initial Vsg (verb in singular) in Classical Arabic (‘verbal sentence’) is unique among the Semitic languages, and can therefore be postulated to be innovative in it. This paper situates this phenomenon in the larger context of the development of so-called deflected agreement (FSG agreement with a plural subject). A three-stage historical model is developed whereby stage 2 in particular saw an explosion of FSG agreement among almost all categories of plural subject nouns. It is during this phase that categorical initial Vsg is argued to have emerged. However, the origin of the characteristic Arabic deflected agreement rule is tentatively suggested to have begun not among plural nouns but among collectives, comparable phenomena in Hebrew and Syriac indicating a West Semitic origin. The three stages are to be understood as being each associated with different speech communities, which explains why each of the stages is still attested in different parts of the Arabic-speaking world today.

A Descriptive and Comparative Grammar of Andalusi Arabic. Edited by Institute of Islamic Studies of the University of Zaragoza. Handbuch der Orientalistik 1, vol. 102. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Pp. xxii + 274. €123, $171.

A much discussed morpheme in Semitic historical linguistics is the suffix *-n. Its reflexes include the energic in Classical Arabic, the ventive in Akkadian, and many languages with a [V – n – object pronoun] reflex. Explanations of its origins fall broadly into two camps. One sees it originally as a proto-Semitic verbal suffix, while the other derives it from a grammaticalization of an originally independent [deictic/presentative + object pronoun] element. This paper argues for the correctness of the second explanation, to which end a general reconstruction of the historical development of the morpheme in West Semitic is developed, with particular attention given to Arabic. Although a modest and unobtrusive morpheme, it is argued that the linguistics of *-n is of considerable significance for conceptualizations of Arabic and Semitic historical linguistics.

Arabic, Africa’s largest language, has an outsized role among African languages. It is internally diverse, with interesting dialectal differences between, e.g., North African, Egyptian, and Sudanese dialects; in many regions it is a language of Islamic culture, leaving its imprint in its many loanwords and writing tradition; sociolinguistically and interactionally, e.g. in code-switching, it is represented by a diversity of configurations, each with its own specific outcomes. Arabic as a minority language (e.g. northeastern Nigeria) shows a different variationist profile than does Arabic-dominant Cairo and relatively monolingual Cairo again from Arabic-French-Berber North Africa. Historically unique events produced one of Africa’s few non-European-based creoles in the South Sudan and East Africa. However, apart from an interest in such cultural domains as script and loanwords, Arabic linguistics is hardly integrated into African linguistics, reflecting more the division of labor between orientalists and Africanists in the West than the language reality in Africa.

Idioms have generally played a supporting rather than a leading role in research on figurative language. In Cognitive Linguistics for instance idioms have been understood against how they are embedded in conceptual metaphors (Lakoff 1987, Women, fire, and dangerous things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Clausner and Croft 1997, Productivity and schematicity in metaphors. Cognitive Science 21. 247–282) while in the experimental psycholinguistic tradition their role has been to challenge the basis of conceptual metaphor in “priming” figurative language (Glucksberg et al. 1993, Conceptual metaphors are not automatically accessed during idiom comprehension. Memory and Cognition 21. 711–719; McGlone 2007, What is the explanatory value of a conceptual metaphor? Language and Communication 27. 109–206). It is, moreover, broadly assumed that criteria defining grammatical properties of idioms are limited to their morphological and syntactic behavior (Nunberg et al. 1994, Idioms. Language 70. 491–538). While the pragmatic properties of idioms have been described informally (Glucksberg 2001. Understanding figurative language: From metaphors to idioms (Oxford psychology series 36). Oxford: OUP), there are few studies which systematically contrast the behavior of nouns in literal vs. idiomatic expressions in discourse. Using a battery of criteria which has been developed to study discourse properties of subjects in spoken Arabic (Owens et al. 2013. Subject expression and discourse embeddedness in Emirati Arabic. Language Variation and Change 25. 255–285), we show that keyword nouns in Nigerian Arabic are significantly different according to whether they are idiomatic or literal. The basis of the conclusion is the statistical analysis of 1403 tokens derived from a large corpus of natural Nigerian Arabic texts. Nouns in idiomatic expressions are opaque to discourse in a way those in literal ones are not. To explain the statistical results we argue that idioms partake in a ‘semantic mapping’ which incorporates the noun and its collocate in the idiom into a word-like unit, rendering it largely invisible to subsequent discourse. Since Nigerian Arabic idiomatic nouns, as is shown, display no clause-internal syntactic constraints, exhibit no cross-clausal syntactic dependencies, and show no significant interactions with possessive pronouns which ostensibly appear to mark the discourse argument of the keyword they are suffixed to, it is concluded that the mapping is of semantic nature. Other than exemplifying basic facts obtained via elicitation, the entire argument hinges on an examination of nouns in actual spoken discourse. The article establishes that large corpora coupled with multivariate statistical treatment contribute directly to understanding semantic factors difficult to evaluate via direct elicitation or examination of individual examples, in this case the sensitivity of cross-clausal referentiality to idiomatic contextualization.

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 metaphoric 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’.

Background Periprosthetic joint infection remains a devastating complication of total joint arthroplasty (TJA). The literature suggests that unnecessary operating room (OR) traffic increases the risk of surgical site infection by increasing bacterial load in the OR. We attempted to determine whether the posting of "restricted access" signs on the outside and inside of OR doors during primary TJA procedures would result in a reduction of OR door openings. Methods This prospectively designed, 2-phase study investigated the number of door openings per case for primary TJA. An independent observer collected data for each TJA case; the OR staff were blinded to the data collection to avoid bias. The first phase of this study recorded OR traffic without the use of "restricted access" signs. In the second, interventional phase of the study, OR traffic was monitored with the concomitant application of "restricted access" signs on the doors. The number of openings per case, from the time of incision to the time of dressing application, was collected. Results The average number of openings per case during the first phase was 75, with 0.59 door openings per minute. The average number of openings per case during the second phase was 40, with 0.28 door openings per minute. Therefore, a 47% reduction in openings per case and a 53% reduction in the number of openings per minute during primary TJA cases were observed. Conclusions We demonstrated that the simple addition of "restricted access" signs on the outside and inside of OR doors produced a significant reduction (p < 0.001) in OR traffic during primary TJA. Clinical Relevance Posting signs can decrease door openings, potentially decreasing infection.

Over a long-term time frame in a language with several discrete dialects, how far does grammaticalization theory elucidate the history of individual morphemes? This issue is addressed using the tense/mode prefix b-, found in Gulf/Najdi, Yemeni, Uzbekistan, Nigerian, and Egyptian/Levantine Arabic. It is argued that while standard grammaticalization theory correctly predicts its assumed origin, from a variant of the verb ‘want’ (yibġa, yiba, yibbi > *b-), it does little to predict its further development. This paper first examines the functions of the prefix *b-. Once integrated as a prefix, *b- takes odd twists and turns, sometimes a tense marker, sometimes a marker of deontic modality, sometimes a generalized modal/indicative marker. Grammaticalization theory says nothing about why *b- should have developed in one way in one dialect and in another way in another. As a step towards answering these questions, the idea of dialects as speech communities is introduced.

One of the more recent, and certainly one of the most empirically well-founded accounts of language change is Labov’s (2007) division between transmission and diffusion. The former results in gradual change via incrementation, the latter in larger and irregular change. This study examines the generality of this distinction, which was based on American vowel systems, against the rich history of Arabic. Five case studies are described in which it is shown that Arabic, like English, has striking instances of language stability across varieties as geo-diachronically separated as Emirati and Nigerian Arabic. By the same token, there are equally striking instances of widespread change due to contact. It is argued that in only one of these, Nubi (Creole Arabic), can diffusional changes be considered irregular, while in three others, Baghdadi Arabic (phonology), Uzbekistan or Central Asian Mixed Arabic (morphology and syntax) and Nigerian Arabic (semantics of idioms), the changes though of differing degrees of magnitude in their outcomes, cannot be said to be irregular. The study highlights two points: global criteria for defining the outcomes of transmission vs. diffusion are elusive, and Arabic, because of the ability to triangulate into different phases of its past, offers an unusually interesting insight into the workings of historical linguistic processes.

Glavda, a central Chadic language, has two types of verbal predicates based on a common root. One, the personal verb, occurs only in predicative position and hence displays a one-to-one relation between morphological and syntactic finiteness, whereas the gerund, of which there are four kinds, occurs equally in predicative and argument position. As a predicate, the personal verb is the basic past or perfect marker and the gerund the incompletive. Syntactically there are no restrictions relative to main or dependent clause as to when a personal verb or a gerund can occur, since the two types together define the tense-aspect system. Still, in actual discourse among the four types of gerund there is a marked difference in their frequency of occurrence in predicative and argument position, such that some gerunds are all but restricted to predicate position, while others have a high frequency as arguments. No syntactic conditions define this difference. This study documents this contrast with basic statistics, and offers an explanation for why the gerunds differ markedly among themselves distributionally. The explanation hinges on the observation that the different gerunds share morphemes with either the personal, finite-only verb or with non-gerund nominals. This produces a statistically graded finiteness among gerunds. Looking at the categorical distribution of gerunds alone would fail to uncover the systematicity behind the differences in their distributional frequencies.

This article contributes to the debate between monosemic and polysemic approaches to linguistic semantics by a close examination of Nigerian Arabic idiomatic expressions involving the keyword ‘head’. Three broad categories of constraints on polysemy can be identified, which limit polysemy, but not to the extent that a fully monosemic account can be motivated. An inherent, stipulative polysemy resides in idioms and in their constitutive lexemes. The attempt to motivate a monosemic account highlights factors constraining polysemy, sets limits to their effects, suggests a taxonomy which brings together essential structural and semantic aspects of idioms, and simultaneously elucidates the rich, multifaceted world of a simple lexeme.

East African Nubi has classic attributes of a creole — it was formed in a short period of time and its structure diverges dramatically from its lexical source, Egyptian and Sudanic Arabic — yet it differs from most creoles as well in that it has a fairly robust morphology (Owens 2001). One could call it a morphologically rich creole, even if its morphology is much simpler than that of Arabic. Understanding why this happened in Nubi presupposes having a solid descriptive historical linguistic account of how this came about. While concentrating on this latter issue, this paper lays the groundwork for understanding the ‘why’ by examining Nubi relative to current theories of creole genesis, including recent SLA models, and by showing that discourse embeddedness played an important role in guiding its development.

Pocos negarían el hecho de que los árabes y los arameos comparten una larga historia común. Tampoco resulta polémico decir que ha habido una influencia basada en el contacto entre ambas lenguas. Sin embargo, lo que no ha sido reconocido hasta hoy día es la profundidad y dimensión de dicha influencia. En este trabajo presento 24 argumentos estructurales y de detalle tomados del terreno de la fonología, morfofonología, morfología y sintaxis para mostrar la amplia influencia del arameo en el árabe preislámico y de los primeros tiempos del islam. Dado que el contacto entre ambas lenguas se prolongó durante tanto tiempo, los efectos del equilibrio, de acuerdo con los términos de Dixon (1997), introdujeron un mosaico de elementos lingüísticos del arameo en el árabe. Estos elementos se presentan en términos de “difusión diaplanar”, es decir, la difusión de diferentes características entre distintas comunidades de hablantes y en épocas diversas.

Since Prince (1981) and Givón (1983), studies on discourse reference have explained the grammatical realization of referents in terms of general concepts such as “assumed familiarity” or “discourse coherence.” In this paper, we develop a complementary approach based on a detailed statistical tracking of subjects in Emirati Arabic, from which two major categories of subject expression emerge. On the one hand, null subjects are opposed to overt ones; on the other, subject-verb (SV) is opposed to verb-subject (VS). Although null subjects strongly correlate with coreferentiality with the subject of the previous clause, they can also index more distant referents within a single episode. With respect to SV vs. VS, morpholexical classes are found to be biased toward one or the other: nouns are typically VS, pronouns SV. We conclude that the null subject variant is the norm in Emirati Arabic, and when an overt subject is appropriate, lexical identity biases the subject into SV or VS order, generating word order as a discourse-relevant parameter. Overall, our approach attempts to understand Arabic discourse from a microlevel perspective.