Arabic linguistics bibliography 1979-1995 by Salman H. Al-Ani and Dilworth B. Parkinson (review)

662 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 3 (1998) Arabic linguistics bibliography 19791995 . By Salman H. Al-Ani and Dilworth B. Parkinson. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Linguistics Club Publications, 1996. Pp. 104. Arabic linguistics is as large and complex as the vast geographical and cultural span which the language covers. The field includes Medieval philology, the study ofthe Arab grammarians, diglossiaandother sociolinguistic topics, and structural analyses of the many living (and extinct but recorded) vernaculars. This bibliography handles literature postdating the period effectively covered by Muhammad Bakalla's well-known bibliography published in 1983. The editors state that the database was put together initially not from their own systematic library search but rather by appealing to members of the Arabic Linguistic Society at its annual conferences to send in bibliographical lists. The coverage is therefore quite ragged and makes no pretense at completeness. The strongest coverage is of English-language works, but there are quite a few foreign-language entries, chiefly French, German, and Russian; a quick scan turns up none in Arabic or Hebrew. The material is not errorfree ; this reviewer has been demoted from author to co-editor of one book. The introduction suggests that the database will be periodically updated, and authors are invited to send in their own listing. The published bibliography itself will presumably be periodically reissued, with corrections as well as additions. [Jeffrey Heath, University ofMichigan.] Understanding Arabic: Essays in contemporary Arabic linguistics in honor of El-Said Badawi. Ed by Alaa Elgibali. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1996. Pp. vii, 274. The honorée is an Egyptian scholar best known for a five-level classification of diglossic speech registers , from literary to colloquial Arabic. The fifteen papers cover historical, philological, sociolinguistic, lexicographic, and applied topics. The contributors include a number of distinguished Arabists, and the volume has more cohesion and reflects a stronger editorial vision than the average Festschrift. Nevertheless , it does not entirely escape the problems typical of the genre. In 'Epilogue: Diglossia revisited' (49-67), Charles Ferguson reflects, often ruefully, on the cottage industry spawned by his famous 1959 article. This is primarily a clarification of the original paper, which was clear enough to start with, and no new ground is broken. Otherpapers about situational registers are by Benjamin Hary, Dilworth Parkinson, and Nabil Abdelfattah . The one contribution on a non-Egyptian dialect, Dionisius Agius's 'Features of Siculo-Arabic ' (33-48), also focuses on register variation, but it is difficult to play it off against the other papers since Sicilian Arabic is a long-extinct variety pieced together from direct and indirect sources (e.g. Arabic loans in Sicilian Italian). Michael Carter has a short piece on 'Signs of change in Egyptian Arabic' (137-43). The only variationist paper is Kassem Wahba, 'Linguistic variation in Alexandrian Arabic: The feature of emphasis' (103-28). Using binary age, sex, and class features to distinguish eight populations, Wahba replicates for Alexandria the familiar finding that women show weaker pharyngealization of 'emphatic ' consonants than men of the same age/class groups but with one exception: In the young working class sector, the women cross over and have the highest pharyngealization value of any group. This class split among younger women is reminiscent of Penny Eckert's studies of American high school students. Kees Versteegh's 'Linguistic attitudes andtheoriginofspeechin the Arab world' (1 5-3 1) dealsperceptively with the difficulties that Arab grammarians of the Classical period had with issues of etymology, variation, and borrowing inconnection with language thought to be divinely established (and therefore pure and immutable). His most interesting remarks concern the relationship between certain early grammarians and the Mu'tazilite theological movement. Devin Stewart's 'Root-echo responses in Egyptian Arabic politeness formulae' (157-80) begins deceptively like a tedious surface description of blessing/reply sequences but then shifts into analytic high gear, connecting the use of 'cognate' forms in the two components with other types of parallelistic constructions, including Koranic verse-terminating phrases. Another interesting language-and-culture contribution is Zeinab Ibrahim and Deborah Kennedy 's 'Figurative language in the speech patterns of Egyptians and Americans' (181-209), which contrasts the interpretations of proverbs offered by Americans (literalist paraphrases) and Egyptians (richer...