list of contributors

Lidia Bettini is Professor of Arabic language and literature at the Uni- versity of Florence. Her research interests include Arabic medieval linguistic thinking and modern Arabic Bedouin dialects. Her recent publi- cations include the volume Contes féminins de la Haute Jézireh syrienne— Matériaux ethno—linguistiques d’un parler nomade oriental, Firenze 2006 and the volume Min sawālif al-ḥarīm fī l-Jazīra al-sūriyya al-‘ulyā, published by the Ministry of Culture of the Syrian Arab Republic, Damascus 2009.

Georges Bohas, PhD in Linguistics and Docteur d’Etat, member of the Institut Universitaire de France, is Professor at the Ecole Normale Supé- rieure de Lyon. He has been working for about twenty years on the restructuration of the Theory of Matrices and Etymons (TME). His last published monograph (in collaboration with M. Dat) is Une théorie de l’or- ganisation du lexique des langues sémitiques : matrices et étymons, Lyon, ENS Editions, 2007.

Antonella Ghersetti is Professor of Arabic Languange and Literature, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice. She holds a PhD in Semitic Studies (Semitic Linguistics) from the University of Florence with a thesis on Dalāʾil al-ʾiʿǧāz of ʿAbd a-Qāhir al-Jurjānī. She is member of IPOCAN, Istituto per l’Oriente “Carlo Alfonso Nallino”, Rome and of UEAI (Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants). She is member of the editorial board of Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Quaderni di Studi Arabi. N.s.; she is also mem- ber of the advisory board of al-Masāq (University of Leeds), of Annali della Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere, University of Sassari and of the international advisory board of Library of Arabic Literature (LAL) of New York University Abu Dhabi and NYU Press. Her main fields of research are themes and techniques of medieval Arabic narrative, the Arabic linguistic tradition, physiognomics in the medieval Arabic tradition.

Jean-Patrick Guillaume, a former Pensionnaire scientifique at the French Institute of Damascus, is Professor at the Université de la Sor- bonne nouvelle and a member of the Laboratoire d’Histoire des théories linguistiques (CNRS). He has published a number of studies on the history 266 list of contributors of Arabic grammar, among them The Arabic Grammatical Tradition (with G. Bohas and D. E. Kouloughli), London, Routledge, 1990.

Giuliano Lancioni, PhD in Linguistics (1995), Roma Tre University, is Professor of Arabic language and literature at the Roma Tre University. He has published a number of studies on the syntax of Arabic (Ordini lineari marcati in arabo, supplement to the Rivista degli Studi Orientali, Rome, 1996) and the history of the Arabic linguistic tradition. He is cur- rently working on issues involved in Arabic computational and corpus linguistics.

Pierre Larcher, PhD (1980) and Docteur d’Etat (1996), University of Paris – Sorbonne Nouvelle, is Professor of Arabic Linguistics at the University of Aix-en-Provence (France) and researcher at the IREMAM (CNRS). He lived in the Arab World (Syria, Libya, Morocco) between 1971 and 1982, holding several research and teaching positions. He has pub- lished extensively in different fields of Arabic and Semitic Linguistics (Le Système verbal de l’arabe classique, 2003; (co-edited with P. Cassuto), La Sémitologie, aujourd’hui, 2000 and La formation des mots dans les langues sémitiques, 2007), and translated Pre-Islamic Arabic Poetry into French (Les Mu‘allaqât, 2000; Le Guetteur de Mirages. Cinq poèmes préis- lamiques, 2004).

‍Aryeh Levin was born in Israel in 1937. He is Professor Emeritus of Arabic at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His main fields of research are: Arabic medieval grammatical thought and terminology, history of Arabic language, and modern Arabic dialects. He was the Head of the Institute of Asian and African Studies of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1992— 1998. In 2010, he was awarded the most prestigious “Israel Prize in general linguistics” for his achievements.

Cristina Solimando, PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies (2006), “La Sapi- enza” University, Rome, is Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the Roma Tre University. Her researches are focused on the history of Arabic medieval linguistic thinking (ʽIlal al-taṯniya: le cause del duale in Ibn Ǧinnī, Le origini della grammatica araba). She is currently working on Corpus Linguistics, especially on blogs.