Previous scholarship on Arabic prepositions typically has presented these as a static closed class of words. Inevitably, such a treatment does not take into account the diachronic development of prepositions into new functions in syntax, semantics and discourse. The present study applies grammaticalization theory to the analysis of prepositions and subordinators across varieties of Arabic. It goes beyond the traditional single-word focus and treats prepositions as parts of multiword complexes. Drawing upon a sizeable base of authentic historical and present-day Arabic data, it presents a rigorously descriptive and quantitative analysis of evolutionary processes involving prepositional forms and subordinators.

The empirical findings of this study establish that prepositions remain central to Arabic language users. It shows that they utilize them for construction of phrases, linked clauses, and organization of discourse, among other notable functions.

Working with Arabic Prepositions: Structures and Functions is a reference book focusing on Arabic prepositions, their structure and usage. The system of Arabic prepositions is complex, and the textbook aims to assist students at the lower intermediate to advanced level understand it in an accessible way. This is an area in which students can experience great difficulty, and the aim of this book is to explain clearly the structures and functions of Arabic prepositions and their usage in Modern Standard Arabic and media Arabic. Drills and exercises are provided to enable readers to practice what they have learned in the chapters. This book will be an ideal source of information for undergraduate students studying Arabic, as well as graduate studies and additional courses in the major dialect areas, and a very useful resource for teachers of Arabic as a foreign language.

This volume explores the way in which grammaticalization processes - whereby lexical words eventually become markers of grammatical categories - converge and differ across various types of language. While grammaticalization at its core is a unidirectional phenomenon, in which the same pathways of change are replicated across languages, certain language types and language areas have distinct preferences with respect to what they grammaticalize and how. Previous work has principally addressed this question with specific reference to languages of Southeast and East Asia that do not seem to grammaticalize paradigms of categories in the same manner as Indo-European languages, or form extensive grammaticalization chains. This volume takes a broader approach and proceeds systematically area by area: specialists in the field address the processes of grammaticalization in languages of Africa, Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and the Americas, and in creole languages. The studies reveal a number of unique pathways of grammaticalization in each language area, as well as identifying the universal shared features of the phenomenon.

In Coastal Dhofari Arabic: A Sketch Grammar, Richard Davey provides a detailed description of a hitherto neglected Arabic dialect found in southern Oman. Previously recorded by Rhodokanakis, as part of the südarabische Expedition of the Austrian Imperial Academy, the dialect presented here offers a specific account of the day-to-day language spoken by the historical sedentary, coastal community. Using data collected during 2010-2012, Richard Davey delivers an overview of the phonology, morphology and syntax of this variety. In addition to this, a lexicon of coastal Dhofari Arabic is provided, along with a discussion of its grammaticalized features. It is a timely account of a dialect that is endangered due to development, modernization, and the resulting social changes in Dhofar.

This volume presents new findings based on the analysis of spoken corpora in thirteen different Afro-Asiatic languages – a unique endeavor in the domain of lesser-described languages. It will be of interest to corpus linguists, general linguists, typologists, and linguists specializing in Afro-Asiatic languages. In addition to the rarity of corpus studies based on endangered and lesser-described languages, the volume is remarkable due to its focus on the role of prosody in interaction with several other phenomena, including code-switching and borrowing. Phonology, syntax, and information structure are explored, and the issue of the elaboration of strategies for the typological comparison of corpora is addressed in several papers. The volume also contains a presentation of software development conducted within the scope of the CorpAfroAs project and based upon the widely used ELAN. The sound-indexed, and morphosyntactically-annotated corpora, with their OLAC metadata and several other deliverables can be accessed and searched at http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/scl.68.website.

Most of the papers in this volume originated as presentations at the conference Biblical Hebrew and Rabbinic Hebrew: New Perspectives in Philology and Linguistics, which was held at the University of Cambridge, 8–10th July, 2019. The aim of the conference was to build bridges between various strands of research in the field of Hebrew language studies that rarely meet, namely philologists working on Biblical Hebrew, philologists working on Rabbinic Hebrew and theoretical linguists. This volume is the published outcome of this initiative. It contains peer-reviewed papers in the fields of Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew that advance the field by the philological investigation of primary sources and the application of cutting-edge linguistic theory. These include contributions by established scholars and by students and early career researchers.