Perspective on Arabic linguistics IX Ed. by Mushira Eid and Dilworth Parkinson (review)

174 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 75, NUMBER 1 (1999) Rabbi Moses Ben Maimón. Section 6 is devoted to Maimonides's linguistic investigations (28-39). Of interest to modern-day linguists are the concepts of the two kinds ofmeanings he postulated: ¡dhir 'outer meaning' and batm 'inner meaning' ( = 'concealed sense') (3 1). I see in these terms a medieval precursor to the notion of deep and surface structure (see 276-77 for the Arabic tradition per se). Jan Houben's 'The Sanskrit tradition' (51-145) is a concise survey of this vast and intricate topic, containing an excellent bibliography with two pages of primary sources and seven pages of secondary ones. The section on grammar and semantics in Pänini 's Astädhyäyl is important for modern linguists in that (1) Pänini (fourth century bc [302]) is, by far, the best known of all the Indian grammarians, and (2) linguistics b.c. (before Chomsky) had very definite theoretical underpinnings. Confirming the aforementioned hypothesis, the author quotes Frits Staal's (1995) 'The Sanskrit of silence' (Journal of Indian Philosophy 23:73-127) '[the Astädhyäyl] treated Sanskrit as creative and infinite energeia in the sense in which that Greek term is associated with von Humboldt or Chomsky' (85). Ineke Sluiter's 'The Greek tradition' (149-224) is a comprehensive discussion of the writings of the Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Epicurus, etc. As can be observed with the other traditions as well, etymology was an early concern ofthe Greeks, which the author emphasizes 'set the tone for what was to come' (216). The early emphasis on word meaning culminated m the work of Apollonius Dyscolus (second century ad), 'in which semantical concerns came to form the basis of a theory of grammatical regularity ' (218). Kees Versteegh's 'The Arabic tradition' (227-84) begins with an impressive statistic, viz., between 750-1500 ad more than 4,000 Arab linguists wrote thousands of treatises about Arabic grammar, most of which have not survived. Explaining the exegetical methodology of the grammarians, the author correctly notes that it was Slbawayhi (d. 793 ad?) who first broke with tradition by focusing on linguistic rather than purely textual considerations (241). Section 4, 'The role ofsemantics in Arabic linguistic theory' (244-5 1 ), discusses the notion of taqdlr 'underlying structure'. Versteegh convincingly demonstrates that Slbawayhi clearly distinguished between the deep and surface structures of sentences. It is interesting to observe that current linguistic research on logical form has, in my view, a precursor in the Arabic tradition. We are told that the logicians studied meaning from the perspective of 'universal concepts': 'The general attitude of the linguists towards meaning changed drastically when they were challenged by the universalist claims of the logicians who tried to monopolize the study ofmeaning' (274). The final chapter, 'Meaning in four linguistic traditions : A companson' (285-300) is a useful summary of the volume. Section 1 1 of this essay shows that the Hebrew status of exegesis was different from the others (298-99). This tome is a solid contribution to the history of linguistics. A chapter on the direct and indirect influence of one tradition on another would have greatly enhanced it, however. [Alan S. Kaye, California State University, Fullerton.] Perspective on Arabic linguistics IX. Ed. by Mushira Eid and Dilworth Parkinson . (Current issues in linguistic theory , 141.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996. Pp. vii, 249. These are the published proceedings of the ninth annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics held at Georgetown University in March 1995. The volume contains twelve essays in four areas· codeswitching, grammatical perspectives, acquisition, and negation. Carol Myers-Scotton, Janice L. Jake, and Maha Okasha's 'Arabic and constraints on codeswitching ' (9-43) contains data from Arabic and three European languages—English, French, and Dutch It is sometimes confusing to follow the examples offered, which are based on the third author's unpublished (1995) study in which 'he' occurs as huwi (34) and howi (39) (my transcription would be huwwi, paralleling hiyyi 'she', both with geminated approximants). The authors propose some refinements to Mushira Eid's research on pronoun doubling . Louis Boumans's 'Embedding verbs and collocations in Moroccan Arabic/Dutch codeswitching' (45-67) reiterates the important distinction...