The majority of these articles dedicated to Michael G. Carter address aspects of Classical Arabic grammar. Ramzi Baalbaki discusses Mu'addib's treatise Daqa-'iq al-Tas.rif. Kees Versteegh considers questions of the government of 'inna in a treatise by the grammarian al-Warraq. Yasir Suleiman considers the fierce extra-linguistic debates which took place in the wake of two recent publications provocatively featuring Sibawayhi's name in the title. Pierre Larcher treats questions of authenticity surrounding a longish quotation from al-Farabi's Kitab al-'alfaz wa-l-huruf. Adrian Gully addresses the relationship between two important treatises on syntax and rhetoric from the eighth and sixth centuries AH respectively. Georges Bohas and Abderrahim Saguer consider the extent to which Arabic roots display a biliteral core which can be assigned a fairly constant semantic value. James Dickins provides an in-depth analysis of the system of verbal diatheses in Central Urban Sudanese Arabic. Werner Diem investigates the euphemistic use of the root lhq in its first and fourth forms to refer to death. Ronak Husni and Janet Watson analyse typical patterns of errors in Arabic essays written by English-speaking learners of Arabic. Finally, in a case study of the medieval translations of Aristotle's Poetics, Lutz Edzard and Adolf Kohnken look at the central status of Arabic for the transmission of Classical knowledge.

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.

The collection of articles in this volume is dedicated to Ramzi Baalbaki of the American University of Beirut on the occasion of his 60th birthday. The volume reflects the central themes of Ramzi Baalbaki’s scholarly work: history of Arabic grammar, Arabic lexicography, Arabic linguistics, comparative Semitics, Arabic epigraphy, and textual editing of classical texts. It provides intellectual, literary, and social historians, as well as Arabists, philologists, and linguists with an interesting glimpse into the early medieval and modern traditions related to the Arabic language, its grammar, historical development, and demonstrates its centrality to other fields of study such as Qur’ānic studies, adab, folk literature, sufism, and poetry. Contributors include: Nadia Anghelescu, Georgine Ayoub, Aziz Azmeh, Monique Bernards, Georges Bohas, Gerhard Böwering, Michael Carter, Everhard Ditters, Geert Jan van Gelder, Hassan Hamzé, Peter Heath, Pierre Larcher, Ibrahim Ben Mrad, Bilal Orfali, Wadād al-Qāḍī, Angelika Neuwirth, Karin Ryding, Yasir Suleiman, Kees Versteegh, and David Wilmsen

This lively introduction to Arabic linguistics provides students with a concise, vivid and engaging overview of the language's structure.

The pre-modern period saw a background of inter-ethnic strife among Arabs and non-Arabs, mainly Persians. Starting from the symbolic and cognitive roles of language, Yasir Suleiman shows how discussions about the inimitability and (un)translatability of the Qur'an in this period were, at some deep level, concerned with issues of ethnic election. In this respect, theology and ethnicity emerge as partners in theorising language. Staying within the symbolic role of language, Suleiman goes on to investigate the role of paratexts and literary production in disseminating language ideologies and in cultural contestation. He shows how language symbolism is relevant to ideological debates about hybrid and cross-national literary production in the Arab milieu. In fact, language ideology appears to be everywhere, and a whole chapter is devoted to discussions of the cognitive role of language in linking thought to reality.

Michael G. Carter's Sibawyhi's Principles: Arabic Grammar and Law in Early Islamic Thought is a corrected version, with considerable Addenda, of his 1968 Oxford doctoral thesis, "Sibawayhi's Principles of Grammatical Analysis." It systematically argues that the science of Arabic grammar owes its origins to a special application of a set of methods and criteria developed independently to form the Islamic legal system, not to Greek or other foreign influence. These methods and criteria were then adapted to create a grammatical system brought to perfection by Sibawayhi in the late second/eighth century. It describes the intimate contacts between early jurists and scholars of language out of which the new science of grammar evolved, and makes detailed comparisons between the technical terms of law and grammar to show how the vocabulary of the law was applied to the speech of the Arabs. It also sheds light on Sibawayhi's method in producing his magisterial Kitab.

Until about 60 years ago, linguistic research on the Arabic language in the West was restricted to inquiries on Classical Arabic and the Classical tradition, and spoken Arabic dialects, with historical studies embedded within the broader field of Semitic languages. This situation is changing quickly, not only through the continuation of older research traditions, but also with the integration of new research fields and perspectives. With this expansion comes the danger of specialists in Arabic losing an overview of the field, and of leaving non-specialists without basic resources for evaluating domains of research which they may be interested in for comparative purposes. The Oxford Handbook of Arabic Linguistics will confront this problem by combining state-of-the-art overviews with essays on issues of perspective, controversy, and point of view. In twenty-four chapters, leading experts from around the world will lay out their own stances on controversial issues. The book not only evaluates ways in which questions and theories established in general linguistics and its sub-fields elucidate Arabic, but also challenges approaches which might result in accommodating Arabic to "non-Arabic" interpretations, and brings out the Arabic specificity of individual problems. The Handbook, in one compact volume, gives critical expression to a language which covers large populations and geographical areas, has a long written tradition, and has been the locus of major intellectual fervor and debate.