Perspectives on Arabic linguistics: Papers from the annual symposia on Arabic linguistics, vol. XXII–XXIII: College Park, Maryland, 2008 and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2009 (review)

Within the series of peer-reviewed proceedings resulting from the Arabic Linguistics Society meetings, this volume brings together papers on Arabic phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax, and language acquisition, learning, and contact. Part of its aim is also to showcase the contribution of Arabic linguistics to research on linguistics in general. Facts from Arabic and traditional approaches to Arabic linguistics have played an increasingly significant role in the testing and development of linguistic theory: the index of the Handbook of phonological theory (Goldsmith et al. 2011), for example, lists forty-two references to Arabic as opposed to twenty-nine for French, twenty-two for German, and twenty-eight for American English. Arabic data have contributed significantly to theoretical work in all major areas of linguistics: within phonology and phonetics, the rich set of postvelar consonants raised issues of local and long-distance harmony domains, and the articulatory, acoustic, and auditory correlates of what has traditionally been known as ‘emphasis’; Arabic nonconcatenative word formation has been crucial in the development of templatic morphology, and in recent years raised the question of whether the apparent root-and-pattern morphology of Arabic (and other Semitic languages) is really so different from (more standard) linear morphology; verbless nominal clauses, word order, and the sensitivity of agreement in Standard Arabic to the relative position of the subject and verb have prompted many solutions within generative and functionalist syntax; the interplay within the Arab world of different language registers has stimulated research on the effects of diglossia, language contact, and language change; and the degree of variation exhibited particularly within phonological systems across the Arab world has led to considerable research on the patterns and typology of word stress and syllabification within various phonological paradigms.

The volume begins with a state-of-the-art introduction to the compilation, the role of Arabic within linguistic theory, and current trends in Arabic linguistics. The papers on phonetics and phonology in Part 1 deal with word stress and language processing (Rajaa Aquil), voicing assimilation (Rawiah S. Kabrah), the phonology-syntax interface and phrasal syncope (Mahasen Hasan Abu-Mansour), and intonation (Dina El Zarka). The papers on morphology and syntax in Part 2 examine mood (Tommi Leung), agreement, ‘Pro drop’ and reciprocal expressions (Abdelkader Fassi Fehri), Palestinian comparatives (Yaron McNabb and Christopher Kennedy), the analysis of kan in Moroccan Arabic (Nizha Chater-Moumni), and the split-CP hypothesis (Murtadha J. Bakir). The papers on language acquisition, learning, and contact in Part 3 focus on aspects of language contact (Mary Ann Walter), voice onset time (VOT) production in Arabic-English bilingual children (Eman Saadah), phonological processing in a diglossic environment (Elinor Saiegh-Haddad), and the acquisition of SVO and VSO word order (Reem Khamis-Dakwar). I consider a selection of these papers here.

In Part 1, Rajaa Aquil’s paper describes an empirical ‘word spotting’ study used to test the claim that Cairene Arabic (CA) is a stress-timed language. This paper examines the extent to which native speakers of CA are able to spot attested CA words within nonsense words. In the experiment, CA words of the structure CVCC were embedded in nonsense words followed by weak syllable (SW), followed by stressed syllable (SS), and followed by epenthetic vowel then stressed syllable (SwS). The CA word occupies the stressed syllable of the nonsense word only in the case of SW. The results show processing is significantly quicker when a CA word is followed by a weak syllable than when followed by a stressed syllable...