Word Order in Arabic.

• Author: Carter, M.G.
• Position: Reviews of Books

Word Order in Arabic. By SVE-OLAF DAHLGREN, Orientalia Gothoburgensia, vol. 12. Gothenburg: ACTA UNIVERSITATIS GOTHOBURGENSIS, 1998. Pp. 273. SKr 200.

This work falls into two complementary sections, a long and often critical review of the relevant theoretical linguistic issues, and a detailed statistical analysis of data from modern spoken and medieval written Arabic, with the aim of bringing some quantifiable precision to the question of word order, a topic which, as Dahlgren observes, has up to now been treated almost entirely impressionistically.

The introductory chapters may in fact be read independently as a historical survey of the major preoccupations of (mostly) twentieth-century linguistics, to which Dahlgren acts as a coolly skeptical but fair-minded guide. After an illuminating preamble contrasting the inductive (essentially Prague school and diachronic) and deductive (especially the Transformationalist, and intrinsically synebronic) approaches, he proceeds to review the full spectrum of linguistic concepts that he will use to evaluate his data. They can only be listed here: the confusion over such "hazy" (his word) notions as subject and predicate, the disputed existence of universals in word order, the functional sentence perspective, discourse analysis (both typologically and in terms of the structural consequences of foregrounding, backgrounding and narrative peak, especially for word order), markedness, the hierarchy of topicality, tense/aspect/mood, and affirmation/negation. Through all this Dablgren leaves little doubt as to his prefere nce for induction over the abstractions of the deductivists (he would be the first to agree with Karl Popper's description of science as "the art of systematic over-simplification"), and indeed an express purpose of the book is to demonstrate the superiority of induction by testing modern theories against the facts. One conspicuous manifestation of aggressive deduction escapes his overt criticism, however, namely the insistence on treating topicalization structures as "left dislocation" or "anacoleuthon' etc., as if the structure zaydun mata [[blank].sup.[contains]]abuha (to use the standard example from the medieval grammarians) was some kind of deformed version of the "normal" utterance mata [[blank].sup.[contains]]abu zaydin. It is only modern linguists who see it this way, never the medieval grammarians, and in this connection Dahlgren's otherwise very comprehensive bibliography could usefully be extended by the inclusion of Georgine Ayoub's Structure de la phrase verbale en arabe standard (Paris 1981), which argues in strictly Transformation alist categories that this topicalization is in fact "basic."

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