In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Case Endings in Spoken Standard Arabic: Statistics, Norms, and Diversity in Unscripted Formal Speech by Andreas Hallberg
  • Paul A. Sundberg, Director (bio)
Case Endings in Spoken Standard Arabic: Statistics, Norms, and Diversity in Unscripted Formal Speech
Andreas Hallberg.
Studia Orientalia Lundensia, nova series no. 4. Lund, Sweden: Lund University, 2016. xiii + 260 pp., appendices, bibliography, general index, author index. ISBN: 9789187833694. http://www.ht.lu.se/en/series/sol/.

Andreas Hallberg’s dissertation exploring the norms of Spoken Standard Arabic (SSA) fills a critical need in the literature for empirical studies on the actual use of i‘rāb by “proficient, highly educated native speakers of Arabic” when speaking Standard Arabic extemporaneously in formal situations (6). Indeed, it has implications in three areas: (a) for language instruction (his primary motivation) to inform curriculum development and formulate authentic proficiency goals, (b) for language reform in the Arab world to address the conservative language ideology in national Arabic curricula, and (c) for linguistic theory, especially diglossic variation.

The study was motivated by a desire for a model of authentic case usage to implement in the classroom and the lack of detailed descriptions of this register in the literature. The only “model” available has been that of the traditional grammarians: full inflection of every noun not in pausal position, guidelines that correspond little with how Modern Standard Arabic is actually spoken.

As his corpus, Hallberg selected seventeen interviews from Al-Jazeera’s program Liqā’ al-Yawm with Arab opinion makers such as Muḥammad al-Barādi‘ī and Ṣā’ib ‘Arīqāt. He then created a “disambiguated dataset” of nearly fifteen thousand noun and adjective tokens, after first excluding various categories of nouns (e.g., names, [End Page 111] numbers above ten, nouns in formulaic expressions). Morphosyntactic codes were then added to each token (especially whether case-marked or -unmarked) for computer analysis.

Results showed roughly 70 percent of noun tokens were unmarked, with only about 10 percent marked for case. (Remaining percentages were tokens ambiguously marked for case, grammatically indeclinable, or with inaudible endings.) Only 0.3 percent of tokens had case errors, implying that “speakers only insert case endings when they are certain that they can do so correctly” (165).

One of the most striking findings was the wide variation in case use among speakers, ranging from 0.2 percent of potential case endings used (Munīb al-Miṣrī) to an outlier high of 42.2 percent (Ṭayyib Tīzīnī). The second-highest user was Muḥammad Badī‘, at 18.3 percent. Most subjects’ case use ranged from 1.5 percent to 5 percent. Speakers also maintained a consistent rate of case marking throughout their interviews, whether low or high, confounding a common assumption of “discourse drift” (i.e., speakers starting with a show of case use, then moving to a more informal style). The data revealed two distinct groups of SSA speakers by their case marking behavior: those with high overall case marking and those with mid and low case marking. Idiosyncratic variation was even seen in speakers’ preferences for which structures and contexts to assign marked case.

As for morphological effects on case use, the study presents quantitative findings for various noun paradigms, degrees of definiteness, and four specific nominal types. Of the eight noun paradigms, the three most frequent were the triptote paradigm of nouns with three distinctive case vowels (86 percent of tokens in the dataset but only a 4.1 percent likelihood of being marked), sound feminine plurals (5.5 percent of the dataset, with a 2.7 percent likelihood), and diptotes (3.8 percent of the tokens; likelihood 2 percent). Although less frequent, the dual and sound masculine plural paradigms were “by far the most favored for case marking” in nominative position (-ān/-ūn) than any other paradigm: a 42.4 percent likelihood (205). However, only four speakers consistently made this distinction, with the others using the “unmarked” (dialectical) option of -ayn/-īn in all contexts.

Importantly, in terms of the four types of definiteness, case marking was shown to be hierarchical, with this hierarchy consistent across speakers. A key finding was that nouns with a definite article are almost...

pdf

Share