Arabic-L:LING:New Book on Information Structure in Spoken Arabic

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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1) Subject:New Book on Information Structure in Spoken Arabic

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1)
Date: 03 Aug 2009
From:jonathan owens [jonathan.owens at uni-bayreuth.de]
Subject:New Book on Information Structure in Spoken Arabic

Information Structure in Spoken Arabic

Edited by Jonathan Owens, Alaa Elgibali

http://www.routledge.com/shopping_cart/products/product_detail.asp?curTab=DESCRIPTION&id=&parent_id=&sku=&isbn=9780415778442&pc=

About the Book

This book explores speakers’ intentions, and the structural and  
pragmatic
resources they employ, in spoken Arabic – which is different in many
essential respects from literary Arabic. Based on new empirical findings
from across the Arabic world this book elucidates the many ways in which
context and the goals and intentions of the speaker inform and constrain
linguistic structure in spoken Arabic.

This is the first book to provide an in-depth analysis of information
structure in spoken Arabic, which is based on language as it is actually
used, not on normatively-given grammar. Written by leading experts in
Arabic linguistics, the studies evaluate the ways in which relevant  
parts
of a message in spoken Arabic are encoded, highlighted or obscured. It
covers a broad range of issues from across the Arabic-speaking world,
including the discourse-sensitive properties of word order variation,  
the
use of intonation for information focussing, the differential role of
native Arabic and second languages to encode information in a
codeswitching context, and the need for cultural contextualization to
understand the role of "disinformation" structure.

The studies combine a strong empirical basis with methodological and
theoretical issues drawn from a number of different perspectives  
including
pragmatic theory, language contact, instrumental prosodic analysis and
(de-)grammaticalization theory. The introductory chapter embeds the
project within the deeper Arabic grammatical tradition, as elaborated by
the eleventh century grammarian Abdul Qahir al-Jurjani. This book  
provides
an invaluable comprehensive introduction to an important, yet
understudied, component of spoken Arabic.


Chapters

1: Explaining null and overt subjects in spoken Arabic 2: Word order and
textual function in Gulf Arabic 3: Information structure in the Najdi
dialects 4: Word order in Egyptian Arabic: form and function 5: The
information structure of existential sentences in Egyptian Arabic 6: The
pragmatics of information structure in Arabic: colloquial tautological
expressions as a paradigm example 7: From complementizer to discourse
marker: the functions of ’inno in Lebanese Arabic 8: The (absence of)
prosodic reflexes of given/new information status in Egyptian Arabic 9:
Moroccan Arabic—French codeswitching and information structure 10:
Conversation markers in Arabic—Hausa codeswitching: saliency and  
language
hierarchies 11: Understatement, euphemism, and circumlocution in  
Egyptian
Arabic: cooperation in conversational dissembling

Contributors

Robin Dodsworth, Department of English, North Carolina State University,
Raleigh North Carolina, US

Malcolm Edwards, School of Languages, Linguistics and Culture,  
University
of London, UK

Mohammed Farghal, Department of English, Kuwait University, Kuwait

Marie-Aimée Germanos, UFR Orient Monde Arab, University Paris III,  
Paris,
France

Jidda Hassan, Department of Languages and Linguistics, University of
Maiduguri, Nigeria

Sam Hellmuth, Department of Language and Linguistic Science, The
University of York, UK

Clive Holes, Magdalen College, University of Oxford, UK

Bruce Ingham, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of
London, UK

David Mehall, SAIC, Stafford Virginia, US

Mustafa Mughazy, Department of Foreign Languages, Western Michigan
University, Kalamazoo, US

Jonathan Owens, University of Bayreuth, Germany

Trent Rockwood, University of Maryland CASL, College Park, Maryland, US

David Wilmsen, The American University in Beirut, Lebanon

William Young, SAIC, Stafford, Virginia, US

Karima Ziamari, University of Fez, Morocco and CREAM-LACNAD, Paris,  
France


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End of Arabic-L:  03 Aug 2009