This book investigates the historical paths leading from pronouns to markers of verbal agreement and proposes a unified formal account of this grammaticalization process. In opposition to beliefs widely held in the literature, it is argued that new agreement formatives can be coined in a multitude of syntactic environments. Still, the individual paths toward agreement are shown to exhibit a set of underlying similarities which are attributed to universal principles that govern the reanalysis of pronominal clitics as exponents of verbal agreement across languages. It is claimed that syntactic principles impose only a set of necessary conditions on the reanalysis in question, while its ultimate trigger is morphological in nature. More specifically, it is argued that the acquisition of inflectional morphology is governed by blocking effects which operate during language acquisition and promote the grammaticalization of new markers if this change serves to replace ‘worn-out’, underspecified forms with new, more specified candidates.

For a lifetime Kees Versteegh played a leading role in Arabic linguistics, dialects (diglossia, creolization, pidginization), the history of Arabic grammar, and other fields related to Arabic. From among his global contacts, colleagues contributed to a Liber Amicorum in appreciation of his stimulating efforts to reopen, deepen and complete our knowledge of Arabic Grammar and Linguistics. In three sections, History, Linguistics and Dialects, 27 contributors discuss (alphabetically): bilingual verb construction; contractual language; current developments; language description; language use; lexicology; organization of language; pause; sentence types; and specific topics: ʾallaḏī; featuring; government; homonymy; ʾiḍmār; inflection; maṣdar; the origin of grammatical tradition; variety conflicts; and verbal schematic (ir)regularities; waqf; and ẓarf.

A guide to Arabic syntax covering a broad variety of topics including argument structure, negation, tense, agreement phenomena, and resumption. The discussion of each topic sums up the key research results and provides new points of departure for further research.