This breakthrough study argues for a significant link between phonetics and phonology. Its authors propose that phonological rules and representations are tightly constrained by the interaction of formal conditions drawn from a limited universal pool and substantive conditions of a phonetically motivated nature. They support this proposal through principled accounts of a variety of topics such as vowel harmony, neutrality, and under specification.Unlike much work on this topic, Archangeli and Pulleyblank provide an explicit account of their assumptions, defined in a comprehensive theory of phonological rules and representations. The authors survey an impressive range of data, including an investigation of cross-linguistic patterns of ATR Harmony. They demonstrate that their theory is flexible enough to account for variation in individual phonological systems, yet it is firmly constrained by a small set of well-motivated principles. Extensive references throughout the book to published and unpublished work provide a valuable roadmap through this semicharted terrain.The approach in Grounded Phonology is modular, in that it presents a theory composed of subtheories, each of which is independently motivated, and the role of each module is to constrain the range of possibilities (of wellformedness)in its domain. Differences among languages can arise from differing intramodular selections or from interaction among modules.Diana Archangeli is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. Douglas Pulleyblank is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia.

This book intends to place Nick Clements’ contribution to Feature Theory in a historical and contemporary context and to introduce some of his unpublished manuscripts as well as new work with colleagues collected in this book.

This book is the first comprehensive account of the phonology and morphology of Arabic. It is a pioneering work of scholarship, based on the author's research in the region. Arabic is a Semitic language spoken by some 250 million people in an area stretching from Morocco in the West to parts of Iran in the East. Apart from its great intrinsic interest, the importance of the language for phonological and morphological theory lies, as the author shows, in its rich root-and-pattern morphology and its large set of guttural consonants. Dr Watson focuses on two eastern dialects, Cairene and San'ani. Cairene is typical of an advanced urban Mediterranean dialect and has a cultural importance throughout the Arab world; it is also the variety learned by most foreign speakers of Arabic. San'ani, spoken in Yemen, is representative of a conservative peninsula dialect. In addition the book makes extensive reference to other dialects as well as to classical and Modern Standard Arabic. The volume opens with an overview of the history and varieties of Arabic, and of the study of phonology within the Arab linguistic tradition. Successive chapters then cover dialectal differences and similarities, and the position of Arabic within Semitic; the phoneme system and the representation of phonological features; the syllable and syllabification; word stress; derivational morphology; inflectional morphology; lexical phonology; and post-lexical phonology. The Phonology and Morphology of Arabic will be of great interest to Arabists and comparative Semiticists, as well as to phonologists, morphologists, and linguists more generally.

This book contains a comprehensive grammatical description of Mehri, an unwritten Semitic language spoken in the Dhofar region of Oman, along with a corpus of more than one hundred texts. Topics in phonology, all aspects of morphology, and a variety of syntactic features are covered. The texts, presented with extensive commentary, were collected by the late T.M. Johnstone. Some are published here for the first time, while the rest have been newly edited and translated, based on the original manuscripts. Semitists, linguists, and anyone interested in the folklore of southern Arabia will find much valuable data and analysis in this volume, which is the most detailed grammatical study of a Modern South Arabian language yet published.

A comprehensive introduction to the linguistic fundamentals of modern Arabic, ideal for Arabic language learners as well as speakers interested in developing a richer understanding of language use and behavior Introduction to Arabic Linguistics presents a clear and engaging overview of the core linguistic aspects of modern Arabic, focusing on Modern Standard Arabic and Levantine Arabic. Designed to be welcoming for undergraduates without fluency in Arabic and for students with only limited familiarity with linguistics, this textbook covers all fundamental areas of Arabic linguistics. Detailed yet accessible chapters include comprehension and analysis questions, critical thinking exercises, application examples with authentic data, reading assignments, and classroom and homework projects. This valuable textbook is organized into three units which cover sounds and sound systems, word structure and meaning, and phrases and phrase structure. Author Youssef Haddad draws from both the Arabic grammatical tradition and recent linguistic research to provide students with a solid foundation in the linguistic features and structures of Arabic sounds, words, and phrases. Topics include phonological processes, derivational morphology, noun and verb phrases, sentence structure, structural ambiguity, and more. Discusses key topics in the formal study of Arabic linguistics, suitable for Arabic speakers and language learners Encourages students to investigate a dialect not covered in the book at different levels of linguistic analysis Answers many of the most common and relevant questions in the field of Arabic linguistics Includes a typological and historical overview of the Arabic language Offers an instructor’s website with additional exercises, practice questions, PowerPoint presentations, and answer keys Introduction to Arabic Linguistics is the perfect textbook for undergraduates in modern language and linguistic courses and a valuable resource for graduate students in Arabic studies or linguistics programs.