In 1997 Naphtali Kinberg died, one of the best specialists in Classical Arabic and the Arabic grammatical tradition. His main work, the index on Farrā’'s Ma‘ānī l-Qur’ān, which appeared in the Brill series Handbook of Oriental Studies (1996) will remain one of the most important reference tools for future research in this field. In this volume the editors have collected a number of articles in which Kinberg demonstrates his ability to combine modern linguistic insights with the theories of the Arab grammarians. The result is a series of detailed studies on such aspects of the structure of Arabic as conditional sentences, adverbial clauses, and the particles lākin and qad. These articles have been published before, sometimes in relatively inaccessible journals. They are now made available in a collective volume, and made accessible by an index that will facilitate using them in research on Arabic linguistics. This volume also contains an important study that was part of Kinberg's legacy, the edition and translation of a treatise on the pronunciation of the ḍād by the grammarian ‘Alī al-Mansūrī (12th/18th century). This treatise is an important document on a hitherto neglected aspect of Arabic phonetic studies. It discusses the phonetic status of the sound that was regarded by the Arabs themselves as the most characteristic sound of their language.

In view of the great upsurge of interest in syntax in recent years, it is remarkable that there are so few studies of Arabic syntax, and the works of a diachronic orientation are virtually nonexistent. The main portion of this book is historical, dealing with fundamental mechanisms of syntactic and semantic change. Here Bloch has made a substantial contribution to the historical syntax of Arabic. Throughout the book the phenomena are viewed form a broad perspective that takes into account evidence not only from all periods and genres of Arabic (Ancient Poetic, Koranic, Classical, Middle, Modern Literary and Colloquial) but also from other Semitic (and occasionally non-Semitic). In the second printing are almost exclusively corrections of misprints and other minor alterations made.

In Tense and Text in Classical Arabic, Michal Marmorstein presents a new discourse-oriented analysis of the indicative tense system in Classical Arabic. Critical of commonly held assumptions regarding the binary structure of the tense system and the perfect-imperfect asymmetry, the author redefines the discussion by analysing the extended syntactic and textual environments in which the paradigm of the indicative forms is used.The study shows that the function of Classical Arabic tenses is determined by the interaction of their inherent grammatical meaning and the overall dialogic, narrative, or generic contexts in which they occur. It also demonstrates the particularizing effect of context, so that temporal and aspectual meanings are always more nuanced, delicate, and pragmatically motivated in actual discourse.

"Based on a doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Oxford in 1983"--Pref.

This volume provides a general perspective on aspects of Arabic in relation to various areas of linguistics. To the general linguist, it is a source of information and data on Arabic analyzed within current models of analysis; to the Arabic linguist, it provides current analyses of both familiar and new data. The book is divided into three sections, which contain exciting papers on Arabic syntax (mostly within Government-Binding theory), textual analysis, and psycholinguistics. The volume opens with an overview of the current state of Arabic linguistics by the Editor and a major presentation by Charles Ferguson.

A Linguistic History of Arabic presents a reconstruction of proto-Arabic by the methods of historical-comparative linguistics. It challenges the traditional conceptualization of an old, Classical language evolving into the contemporary Neo-Arabic dialects. Professor Owens combines established comparative linguistic methodology with a careful reading of the classical Arabic sources, such as the grammatical and exegetical traditions. He arrives at a richer and more complexpicture of early Arabic language history than is current today and in doing so establishes the basis for a comprehensive, linguistically-based understanding of the history of Arabic. The arguments are set out in a concise, case by case basis, making it accessible to students and scholars of Arabic and Islamicculture, as well as to those studying Arabic and historical linguists.