The Syntax of Spoken Arabic: A Comparative Study of Moroccan, Egyptian, Syrian, and Kuwaiti Dialects (review)

In response to the notoriously spotty literature on comparative syntax (as opposed to morphology) of spoken Arabic varieties, this study usefully compares a wide range of syntactic features of four spoken dialects: Moroccan, Egyptian, Syrian, and Kuwaiti. Brustad works largely from corpora of spontaneous data elicited in fieldwork while making ample occasional reference to published sources. Her orientation is functionalist rather than generative, and her analysis concentrates on how various constructions and contrasts are wielded to convey information structure. In this, B brings the analysis of comparative Arabic syntax in line with modes of analysis well established in general linguistic analysis over the past thirty years.

Within the noun phrase, she shows that degree of individuation plays a decisive role, often obscured in treatments taking the codified rules of Classical Arabic as a model, in definiteness marking, the dual, the choice between synthetic and analytic marking of possession, and the use of demonstratives. Her nuancing the traditionally proposed binary alternation between definite and indefinite in Arabic with the analysis of markers of the ‘indefinite specific’ is especially useful, as is her discussion of the dialects’ anaphoric demonstratives roughly equivalent to this in English I met this doctor.

In the verb phrase, B notes that in narratives, imperfective forms are used to convey the descriptive while perfective forms move the ‘plot’ forward. Meanwhile, an array of motion verbs is used in auxiliary function to lend ‘narrative contour’, such as the use of a verb meaning ‘to get up’ to convey suddenness or inception as in the English She up and married him. She analyzes aspect as more central to spoken Arabics than tense, which is indexed to moment of speech and can be neutralized within a narrative after one marking. Modality marking, in which the spoken dialects collapse Classical Arabic’s subjunctive and jussive paradigms into an unmarked imperfective (or in the case of Kuwaiti, eliminate the morphological distinction in favor of an emergent nonindicative particle), varies the most across dialects of all of the features B covers. However, even here, aspect remains determinative, with imperfective used with stative conditionals and perfective used with punctual ones.

Contrary to common wisdom that spoken Arabic has become SVO in contrast to Classical Arabic’s VSO, B’s data reveal VSO as robust in all four varieties, used to narrate events, whereas SVO order is recruited for the descriptive in a topic-prominent configuration. B supplements the text with an appendix of extended passages of running speech in all four dialects.

Given the author’s interest in analyzing Arabic used as a spoken language, ideally the book would include more comparison with Classical Arabic. The differences between this formalized, written variety and the spoken ones would be especially germane in justifying one of B’s guiding impulses—to analyze Arabic as it is actually used in casual speech in line with the tenets of modern linguistic analysis. But the study remains an invaluable contribution to the study of discourse analysis, comparative dialectology, and Semitic linguistics.