Spoken Arabic is different in many respects from literary Arabic. This book is concerned with speakers’ intentions and the structural and pragmatic resources they employ. Based on new empirical findings from across the Arabic world this work will be of interest to both students and researchers.

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.

The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Sociolinguistics comprises 22 chapters encompassing various aspects in the study of Arabic dialects within their sociolinguistic context. This is a novel volume, which not only includes the traditional topics in variationist sociolinguistics, but also links the sociolinguistic enterprise to the history of Arabic and to applications of sociolinguistics beyond the theoretical treatment of variation. Newly formed trends, with an eye to future research, form the backbone of this volume. With contributions from an international pool of researchers, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students of Arabic sociolinguistics, as well as to linguists interested in a concise, rounded view of the field.

Thematic Structure and Para-Syntax: Arabic as a Case Study presents a structural analysis of Arabic, providing an alternative to the traditional notions of theme and rheme. Taking Arabic as a case study, this book claims that approaches to thematic structure propounded in universalist linguistic theories, of which Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics is taken as an illustrative example, are profoundly wrong. It argues that in order to produce an analysis of thematic structure and similar phenomena which is not undermined by its own theoretical presuppositions, it is necessary to remove such notions from the domain of linguistic and semiotic theory. The book initially focuses on Sudanese Arabic, because this allows for a beautifully clear exposition of general principles, before applying these principles to Modern Standard Arabic, and some other Arabic varieties. This book will be of interest to scholars in Arabic linguistics, linguistic theory, and information structure.

Este libro proporciona un marco teórico y diversas pautas para aplicar la dialectología a la enseñanza, situándose en el ámbito de la lingüística aplicada. El desafío radica en llevar la dialectología más allá de la investigación descriptiva. ¿Por qué hay que promocionar el árabe hablado? ¿Cómo pueden los alumnos convertirse en hablantes? ¿Podemos diseñar plantillas morfológicas aplicables a diferentes variedades? El trabajo responde a todo ello a través de sus siete capítulos, y proporciona cuatro planes didácticos basados en teorías e investigaciones actualizadas.

This volume contains a selection of reviewed and revised papers from the twenty-first Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, which was held on March 2–3, 2007, at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. The papers in this volume deal with a variety of topics in Arabic linguistics with a notable number of them emphasizing pragmatic aspects. The papers here included place a high value on the presentation of authentic data and explore different approaches in their analysis.

Cognate Infinitives have been identified and described as productive linguistic features within Arabic language and along the Semitic continuum. However, their full range of function remains largely unstudied in the spoken varieties of Arabic. This study proposes a new grammatical model for the analysis and description of Cognate Infinitives in Lebanese Arabic that accounts for this feature’s semantic, informational, affective and social functions. It suggests that Cognate Infinitives function as focus markers and are efficient communicative tools for a variety of attention management actions as well as for ‘face’ management strategies. The findings of this study therefore replace the omnipresent notion of “adverbial emphasis” with a definition of “focus” that comprises both informational and affective factors.