Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XIII-XIV (review)

This collection represents a broad range of linquistic questions posed with respect to Arabic, including phonetic studies and experiments on L2 acquisition, that were presented at the thirteenth and fourteenth meetings of the Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics conference.

The first four papers are phonetic and phonological studies. Ghada Khattab reports on ‘VOT production in English and Arabic bilingual and monolingual children’. The phonological categories of voiced and voiceless stops have different phonetic correlates in English and Arabic: While English contrasts short lag and long lag, Arabic contrasts long lead and short lag. Although the VOT range for English voiced stops overlaps with the range for Arabic voiceless stops, Khattab finds that bilingual children mostly acquire separate VOT patterns for each language, with exceptions explained through developmental patterns rather than language interference. Bushra Adnan Zawaydeh, Keiichi Tajima, and Mafuyu Kitahara, in ‘Discovering Arabic rhythm through a speech cycling task’, describe a task in which speakers repeat cycling-phrases in time with a metronome. The study attempts to determine which prosodic units occur isochronously and whether the classic categorization of languages as syllable-timed vs. stress-timed can be upheld. Results reveal that Japanese speakers tend to align the halfway point of the interval with the last syllable of the phrase while English and Arabic speakers align the halfway point with the last stressed syllable. Adamantios Gafos, in ‘An argument for a stem-based view of Arabic morphology: Doubled verbs revisited’, departs from the traditional view that reduced stem forms of biliteral roots (e.g. madd-a) are derived by syncope from extended forms (madad-tu) and suggests the reverse: that phonotactics demand epenthesis to syllabify maddtu. However, the explanation comes at a cost: A morphological stipulation must rule out otherwise licit maddatu. Though Gafos’s argumentation is interesting, some tableaux (e.g. ex. 6) omit plausible candidates, and one constraint (*Split, p. 76) is never defined. Robert Ratcliffe compares Classical and Moroccan Arabic plurals through an extended database classification of semipredictable and semiproductive patterns in ‘The broken plural system of Moroccan Arabic: Diachronic and cognitive perspectives’. He arrives at the conclusion that ‘speakers have no knowledge of rules—but that these systematic patterns facilitate memorization’ (94).

The next four papers are on various topics. Frederick Hoyt, in ‘Impersonal agreement as a specificity effect in rural Palestinian Arabic’, notes the optionality of verbal agreement with indefinite subjects of unaccusatives. When verbal agreement occurs, the DP is interpreted as more specific. Hoyt proposes that nonspecific indefinites lack a determiner and hence do not participate in case and agreement relations. Readers should be alerted that some of the crucial glosses in Hoyt’s paper (e.g. ex. 2) are reversed. Fatima Sadiqi studies ‘The syntax of small clauses in Moroccan Arabic’ and finds that in constructions with glosses like ‘I considered [Leyla intelligent]’, the small clause behaves as its own constituent with respect to binding, coordination, and adverbial modification. In Sadiqi’s analysis, the embedded subject receives case from the matrix predicate, explaining the fact that it must precede the embedded predicate. In ‘Borrowing discourse patterns: French rhetoric in Arabic legal texts’, Ahmed Fakhri documents a change in Moroccan court decisions from a more narrative discourse to the syllogistic style of French decisions. In ‘What is a secret language? A case from a Saudi Arabian dialect’, Muhammad Hasan Bakall describes Misf, a Meccan secret language from the 1950s, the corpora of which reveal a pattern of -VVrb- infixation, for example, kul → kuurbul.

The last three papers are experimental investigations of L1 and L2 acquisition. Adel Abu Radwan studies how L2 learners of Arabic interpret VNN structures in ‘Sentence processing strategies: An application of the competition model to Arabic’. In interpreting which noun is the agent, will subjects use word order cues...