The Verb in Literary and Colloquial Arabic.

• Author: KAYE, ALAN S.
• Position: Review

The Verb in Literary and Colloquial Arabic. By MARTINE CUVALAY-HAAK. Berlin: MOUTON DE GRUYTER, 1997. Pp. xx + 278.

This book was the author's doctoral dissertation, written under the supervision of Manfred Woidich at the University of Amsterdam. Its focus is the Arabic verb and the expression of tense, mood, and aspect as analyzed within the model known as Functional Grammar. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to note that Cuvalay-Haak has dedicated it to the memory of one of the leading authorities in this field, Simon C. Dik--see, e.g., his Functional Grammar (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1978); Studies in Functional Grammar (New York: Academic Press, 1980); and The Theory of Functional Grammar: part I: The Structure of the Clause (Dordrecht: Foris).

Chapter one is an introduction to what the author calls "the Arabic language group" (pp. 3-22). Beginning with a discussion of the differences between fusha t-tura[theta] 'the pure Arabic of the heritage' and fusha l-[[blank].sup.[subset]]asr 'the fusha of the age' (p. 3, n. 3--better translated as 'the fusha of [our] time]'), Cuvalay-Haak delves into the position of Arabic within Semitic (following the work of the late Robert Hetzron), the koine theory of the origin of the modern Arabic sedentary dialects, and bedouin vs. sedentary and urban vs. rural dialects, among other germane topics. Some parts of this chapter must have been written years before publication, presumably, since the author refers to two Arab countries called Yemen and South Yemen (p. 10).

Chapter two gives the prerequisite theoretical background of functional grammar up to 1989 (pp. 22-43), whereas chapter three is concerned with post-1989 developments in functional grammar as applied to tense-mood-aspect phenomena (pp. 45- 81). Happily, the author has utilized one of the best references in this field-Robert I. Binnick's Time and the Verb: A Guide to Tense and Aspect (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991).

Chapter four discusses root and pattern morphology in Classical (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) (pp. 83-125). Although most of this material is well known, I am happy to report here the comparative statistics of actual usage of the ten verbal forms (p. 88), based on an unpublished Georgetown University doctoral dissertation by Dulim Masoud Al-Qahtani, "Semantic Valence of Arabic Verbs" (1988); and Moustapha Chouemi's Le verbe dans le Coran: Racines et formes (Paris: Klincksieck, 1966). One interesting contrast between...