Arabic-L:LING:Two New Articles:Subject Expression and Intrusive -n

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Tue 08 Oct 2013
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1) Subject: Two New Articles:Subject Expression and Intrusive -n

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1)
Date: 08 Oct 2013
From: "jonathan owens" <jonathan.owens at uni-bayreuth.de>
Subject: Two New Articles:Subject Expression and Intrusive -n

"Subject expression and discourse embeddedness in Emirati Arabic"
Language Variation and Change, 25/3: 255-85, 2013
JONATHAN OWENS,  ROBIN DODSWORTH,  MARY KOHN

Since Prince (1981) and Givón (1983), studies on discourse reference have
explained the grammatical realization of referents in terms of general
concepts such as “assumed familiarity” or “discourse coherence.” In this
paper, we develop a complementary approach based on a detailed statistical
tracking of subjects in Emirati Arabic, from which two major categories of
subject expression emerge. On the one hand, null subjects are opposed to
overt ones; on the other, subject-verb (SV) is opposed to verb-subject
(VS). Although null subjects strongly correlate with coreferentiality with
the subject of the previous clause, they can also index more distant
referents within a single episode. With respect to SV vs. VS,
morpholexical classes are found to be biased toward one or the other:
nouns are typically VS, pronouns SV. We conclude that the null subject
variant is the norm in Emirati Arabic, and when an overt subject is
appropriate, lexical identity biases the subject into SV or VS order,
generating word order as a discourse-relevant parameter. Overall, our
approach attempts to understand Arabic discourse from a microlevel
perspective.


"The Historical Linguistics of the Intrusive *-n in Arabic and West Semitic"
Journal of the American Oriental Society 133.2: 217-47,  2013.
Jonathan Owens

A much discussed morpheme in Semitic historical linguistics is the suffix
*-n. Its reflexes include the energic in Classical Arabic, the ventive in
Akkadian, and many languages with a [V – n – object pronoun] reflex.
Explanations of its origins fall broadly into two camps. One sees it
originally as a proto-Semitic verbal suffix, while the other derives it
from a grammaticalization of an originally independent
[deictic/presentative + object pronoun] element. This paper argues for the
correctness of the second explanation, to which end a general
reconstruction of the historical development of the morpheme in West
Semitic is developed, with particular attention given to Arabic. Although
a modest and unobtrusive morpheme, it is argued that the linguistics of
*-n is of considerable significance for conceptualizations of Arabic and
Semitic historical linguistics.

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