Arabic Language and Linguistics Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics Series Selected Titles
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Arabic Language and Linguistics Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics Series Selected Titles Crosslinguistic Research in Syntax and Semantics: Negation Tense and Clausal Architecture RAFFAELLA ZANUTTINI, HÉCTOr CAMPOS, ELENA HErBUrGEr, AND PAUL H. POrTNEr, EDITOrS Discourse and Technology: Multimodal Discourse Analysis PhILIP LEVINE AND RON SCOLLON, EDITOrS Educating for Advanced Foreign Language Capacities HEIDI BYrNES, HEAThEr D. WEGEr-GUNThArP, AND KAThErINE SPrANG, EDITOrS Language in Our Time: Bilingual Education and Official English, Ebonics and Standard English, Immigration and Unz Initiative JAMES E. ALATIS AND AI-HUI TAN, EDITOrS Language in Use: Cognitive and Discourse Perspectives on Language and Language Learning ANDrEA E. TYLEr, MArI TAkADA, YIYOUNG KIM, AND DIANA MArINOVA, EDITOrS Linguistics, Language, and the Professions: Education, Journalism, Law, Medicine, and Technology JAMES E. ALATIS, HEIDI E. HAMILTON, AND AI-HUI TAN, EDITOrS Linguistics, Language, and the Real World: Discourse and Beyond DEBOrAh TANNEN AND JAMES E. ALATIS, EDITOrS Little Words: Their History, Phonology, Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics, and Acquisition RONALD P. LEOw, HÉCTOr CAMPOS, AND DONNA LArDIErE, EDITOrS Telling Stories: Language, Narrative, and Social Life DEBOrAh SChIFFrIN, ANNA DE FINA, AND ANASTASIA NYLUND, EDITOrS ARABIC LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS Reem Bassiouney and E. Graham Katz, Editors GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS Washington, DC © 2012 Georgetown University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Arabic language and linguistics / Reem Bassiouney and E. Graham Katz, editors. p. cm.—(Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics Series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-58901-885-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Arabic language—Discourse analysis. 2. Arabic language—Variation. 3. Arabic language—Rhetoric. 4. Arabic language—Usage. I. Bassiouney, Reem. II. Katz, E. Graham. PJ6074.A76 2012 492.701'41—dc23 2011036103 This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials. 15 14 13 12 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 First printing Printed in the United States of America Contents Illustrations vii Preface viii Transliteration Conventions x Introduction xi PART I: THEORETIcAL ANd COMPuTATIONAL LINguISTIcS 1. Negation in Moroccan Arabic: Scope and Focus 3 Nizha Chatar-Moumni, Université Paris Descartes 2. On the Syntax and Semantics of Arabic Universal Quantification 17 Kamel A. Elsaadany, Gulf University for Science and Technology, and Salwa Muhammed Shams, Alexandria University 3. Statistical and Symbolic Paradigms in Arabic Computational Linguistics 35 Ali Farghaly, DataFlux Corporation 4. Raising in Standard Arabic: Backward, Forward, and None 61 Youssef A. Haddad, University of Florida 5. Construct State Nominals as Semantic Predicates 79 Sarah Ouwayda, University of Southern California 6. On Licensing Wh-Scope: Wh-Questions in Egyptian Arabic Revisited 99 Usama Soltan, Middlebury College 7. The Notion of “Complete” and “Incomplete” Verbs in Early Arabic Grammatical Theory: Kāna and Its Sisters 115 Hana Zabarah, Georgetown University PART II. SOcIOLINguISTIcS ANd APPLIEd LINguISTIcS 8. Women and Politeness on Egyptian Talk Shows 129 Reem Bassiouney, Georgetown University 9. Bonjour, ça va? Labas ʿale-ik? French and Arabic in Casablanca 137 Elena Canna, Università per Stranieri di Siena vi Contents 10. Nominalization in Arabic Discourse: A Genre Analysis Perspective 145 Ahmed Fakhri, West Virginia University 11. The Elusiveness of Luġa Wustā. —or, Attempting to Catch Its “True Nature” 157 Gunvor Mejdell, University of Oslo 12. Mexicans Speaking in Dârija (Moroccan Arabic): Media, Urbanization, and Language Changes in Morocco 169 Catherine Miller, University of Aix-en-Provence and Centre Jacques Berque, Rabat 13. Critical Languages and Critical Thinking: Reframing Academic Arabic Programs 189 Karin Christina Ryding, Georgetown University 14. Ideology and the Standardization of Arabic 201 Yasir Suleiman, Cambridge University 15. The Ditransitive Dative Divide in Arabic: Grammaticality Assessments and Actuality 215 David Wilmsen, American University of Beirut Illustrations Figure 3.1 SYSTRAN’s Translation of a Headline on the Al Jazeera Website 52 Tables 5.1 Comparison between the Predicate Approach and the Individual Approach 96 7.1 Kāna and Its Sisters 123 8.1 Number of Interruptions and Overlap Initiated by Women and Men 134 12.1 Example of Script of Translation 170 12.2 Population of Morocco’s Eight Main Cities, 1860–2005 181 15.1 Treatment of Nominal and Pronominal Objects across the East/West Divide 215 15.2 Treatment of Two Pronominal Objects across the East/West Divide 216 15.3 Written Arabic Treatment of Objects of a Ditransitive Verb 217 15.4 Occurrences of PDC and DOC with Manaḥa “to Grant” 218 15.5 Occurrences of PDC and DOC with A‛ṭā “to Give” 218 15.6 Sample of Ditransitive Verbs Taking the DOC, PDC, or Both 224 15.7 Occurrences of Pronominal DOC and PDC in 1,001 Nights 229 Preface The Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics (GURT) has been held since 1949, placing it among the most long-standing language and linguis- tics conferences in the United States. GURT began as a small gathering for research- ers in language studies to share their current work and has gradually grown to become an internationally known forum for linguistic and language research, with an annual thematic focus. The theme of the 2010 Round Table was Arabic Language and Lin- guistics. At Georgetown and around the world, students are flocking to courses on Modern Standard Arabic and on Arabic linguistics. Arabic, one of the official lan- guages of the United Nations, is spoken by more than half a billion people around the world and is of increasing importance in political and economic spheres. In ad- dition the study of the Arabic language has a long and rich history: The earliest grammatical accounts date from the eighth century, and they include full syntactic, morphological, and phonological analyses of the vernaculars and of Classical Arabic. GURT 2010 was cohosted by the Department of Linguistics and by the Depart- ment of Arabic Language and Islamic Studies and was held March 12–14, with scholars of Arabic from around the world presenting research on various aspects of Arabic language study, from grammatical analysis to language pedagogy, and from sociolinguistic investigation to computational analysis. The invited speakers, whose work spanned this spectrum, were Mushira Eid, University of Utah; Ali Farghaly, formerly of Monterey Institute of International Studies and Cairo University, now at DataFlux Corporation; Catherine Miller, French Council of Research and Centre Jacques Berque; Karin Ryding, Georgetown University; and Yasir Suleiman, Univer- sity of Cambridge. GURT 2010 drew more than 200 attendees from around the world, including many from Europe, Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East, making it the largest assemblage of Arabic language scholars in North America to date. Nearly eighty papers were presented in the main sessions, and another two dozen were presented in panel sessions. This volume includes a selection of the papers presented that represents the range and quality of research on the Arabic language in the twenty- first century. We would like to express our gratitude to the Faculty of Languages and Linguis- tics and the Department of Linguistics for their financial support and to the Depart- ment of Arabic Language and Islamic Studies for its institutional support. We are grateful to our reviewers for sharing their expertise in the field and for helping us to select papers for both the conference and for this volume. We are also deeply in debt to our chief graduate organizer, Cala Zubair, whose attention to the countless details of organization was invaluable to the success of the conference, and to our assistant graduate organizer, Jaemyung Goo, who coordinated an army of graduate student assistants and provided essential technical assistance. We also thank the army of graduate students, without whom the conference would have been impossible. Our thanks also go to both Manela Dies and Meriem Tikue, who provided crucial admin- Preface ix istrative assistance before, during, and after the conference. Finally, we would like to thank Mark Muehlhaeusler of the Lauinger Library of Georgetown University for his invaluable help in revising and formatting the texts, the Arabic transliterations, and the references for the chapters presented here. As we prepared this volume to go to press, contributors and editors alike were distracted by the political changes sweeping across the Arab world. We hope that these changes bring new opportunities and inspiration for research on the Arabic language in the context of more open and democratic societies. Transliteration Conventions Table I.1 ḍ ض ʾ أ ṭ ط b ب ẓ ظ t ت ʿ ع θ ث ġ غ j ج f ف ḥ ح q ق x خ k ك d د l ل ð ذ m م r ر n ن z ز h ه s س w و ʃ ش y ى ṣ ص The feminine ending is –a in pause and –at in construct forms. The adjectival ending is transcribed as -ī (masc.) and -īya (fem.), respectively. The vowels in Standard Arabic are represented as a,