Papers from the Third Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, vol. 3, Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics.

• Author: Versteegh, Kees

The two volumes under review are the third and fourth in a series containing the proceedings of the Annual Symposium Arabic Linguistics, organized by Mushira Eid of the Middle East Center, University of Utah. The symposia were held in Salt Lake City, March 3-4, 1989 and in Detroit, March 2-3, 1990. Most of the contributors are American linguists or were trained at an American university, and these two volumes constitute, therefore, an interesting survey of the state of the art of Arabic linguistics in the U.S. I shall come back later to the comparison between European and American linguistic studies in the field of Arabic.

The average quality of the papers in these two volumes is high. There is no thematic unity, apart from the fact that they all deal with the Arabic language. The following categories c ould be distinguished:

Syntax: articles by Eid (III:31-61; IV:107-41); Benmamoun

(III:173-95); Eisele (IV:143-65); Mahmoud

(III:119-34).

Phonology: articles by Broselow (IV:7-45); Abu-Mansour

(III:137-54;IV:47-75); McCarthy(III:63-91).

Sociolinguistics: articles by Walters (III:199-229; IV:

181-217); Abu-Melhim (III:231-50); Haeri (IV:169-80);

Atawneh (IV:219-41); Abu-Haidar (IV:94-106).

There are a few articles on historical themes (Testen, Belnap and Shabaneh, and Al-Harbi), one article on psycholinguistics (Safi-Stagni), one on the Arabic grammatical tradition (Ryding), and one on computational linguistics (Beesley). I shall limit myself to a few remarks about some of the articles in the three principal categories, since these represent the main trends in the symposia. Needless to say, this should in no way be interpreted as a negative judgment on the other articles. One general remark might be that the contributions are characterized by an almost complete absence of historical interest; most of them are concerned with the synchronic analysis of Arabic.

The most remarkable aspect of the articles on Arabic syntax is that they all seem to have been written within a GB framework. I liked particularly Mushira Eid's articles on "Verbless sentences in Arabic and Hebrew" and "Pronouns, questions and agreement." In the first she analyzes the behavior of copula pronouns in Arabic and Hebrew. Originally, she claims, the function of these pronouns was to serve as an anti-ambiguity device, as in ir-raagil huwwa il-mudarris "the man is the teacher," in order to force a sentence interpretation instead of a phrasal one. This function was extended optionally to cases such as ana huwwa il-mudarris "I am the teacher," where no ambiguity is involved. She concludes that there are two sets of pronouns in this function. One...