The Arabic verb: Form and meaning in the vowel-lengthening patterns (review)

Warwick Danks's monograph concerns Arabic verb patterns with a long vowel after the first root consonant (traditionally numbered III and VI, respectively). Originally a doctoral thesis at the University of St. Andrews, The Arabic verb aims at making 'the complexities of the Arabic language accessible for specialists in linguistics and [presenting] linguistic theory comprehensibly to Arabists with no advanced linguistic training' (xiii). The variety of Arabic investigated by D is Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) (2).

After a preface and some technical remarks (xiii-xviii), Ch. 1, 'Introduction' (1-13), establishes the subject of the book, presents very basic linguistic concepts (i.e. Saussurean structuralism), and discusses methodological considerations. D draws on Christopher Beedham's method of lexical exception (Beedham 2005; see pp. 4ff.). The actual language data are obtained in three ways: by excerpting Hans Wehr's fundamental dictionary of MSA (Wehr 1994), by questioning native speaker informants, and by consulting arabiCorpus, a web-based resource accessible at http://arabicorpus.byu.edu (see pp. 13, 15). Overall, though, D rarely quotes examples of actual language use from texts. Most passages cited either stem from other sources like grammars and textbooks, or are presumably invented. The latter particularly applies to the many sentences quoted from the questionnaire for the informants.

Ch. 2, 'Verbal morphology and the lexicon' (15-37), presents basic data on the morphology of the Arabic verb by paying special attention to the different verbal patterns and their statistical frequency based on Wehr's dictionary (29ff.). Some of the morphological information may be considered rather superfluous in a book dealing primarily with patterns III and VI, but the statistical data are quite interesting: 465 pattern III verbs are listed, equivalent to 15.7% of all triliteral root verbs. It has to be borne in mind that these data apply only to TYPES; the TOKEN count in actual usage may differ considerably. Already in this chapter, D makes extensive use of the chi-square test, a statistical hypothesis test (32ff.). Although this methodology yields interesting results, its complexity may not be readily comprehensible to many readers unfamiliar with mathematical statistics. Considering the complexity of this methodology, D's statistical results seem overall a bit meager (see the summary, p. 102: for example, 'one-quarter of pattern III and one-third of pattern VI verbs do not conform to these dominant meanings' or 'The mutual-reciprocal relationship between the patterns has been validated statistically as a real phenomenon, but it is still inadequate to explain the meanings of over 30% of the pattern III-pattern VI verb pairs').

Ch. 3, 'Alternative morphologies' (39-62), discusses newer proposals that seek to supplant the traditional root-pattern analysis of Semitic morphology, that is, word- and stem-based approaches (40ff.), as adopted, for instance, by Robert R. Ratcliffe (1997). In addition, D introduces prosodic templatic morphology (55), which assumes the arrangement of three tiers in the formation of words (vowel melody, CV skeleton, root). But the use of CV skeletons such as CvCCvC for kuttib- 'was caused to write' (56) blurs important differences in the language (e.g. vowel quality, consonantal length, status of approximants). The same CV skeleton, for example, is applicable to words like mahǧar 'exile', ʾazraq 'blue', kattab- 'caused to write', or tarǧam- 'translated', so that its information value is somewhat limited. And what exactly determines the vowel melody of a given word? In the end, therefore, the traditional root-pattern analysis seems much more compelling; no one would dispute the fact that other mechanisms like analogy, for example, are at work in Semitic morphology as well (similarly D, 50ff.).

Ch. 4, 'Understanding Arabic verbal semantics' (63-81), tackles the intriguing problem of the lack of systematically predictable semantics in the derived verbal stems, based on the secondary literature. D states rightfully that no approach so far has yielded satisfactory results. Since D's target language is MSA, it...