<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">------------------------------------------------------------------------</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Arabic-L: Wed 09 Jan 2008</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <<a href="mailto:dilworth_parkinson@byu.edu">dilworth_parkinson@byu.edu</a>></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">[To post messages to the list, send them to <a href="mailto:arabic-l@byu.edu">arabic-l@byu.edu</a>]</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">[To unsubscribe, send message from same address you subscribed from to</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="mailto:listserv@byu.edu">listserv@byu.edu</a> with first line reading:</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "> unsubscribe arabic-l ]</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">-------------------------Directory------------------------------------</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">1) Subject:Word Order and Generative Grammar</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">-------------------------Messages-----------------------------------</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">1)</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Date: 09 Jan 2008</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">From:"Benjamin Geer" <<a href="mailto:benjamin.geer@gmail.com">benjamin.geer@gmail.com</a>></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Subject:Word Order and Generative Grammar</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><blockquote type="cite"> 3) if we go with 1)a)ii) then we clash with every Arab speakers native<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"> intuition [...]<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">I don't see how you can explain even the simplest facts without<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">having a formalism that allows the researcher to model mixed lects.<br></blockquote><br>I agree, but I think there's more to it than that. Since Standard<br>Arabic isn't anyone's native language, can you talk about people's<br>intuitions about it in the same way that you talk about their<br>intuitions about their native language?<br><br>Moreover, if the boundaries between languages are determined by mutual<br>comprehensibility, surely Standard Arabic counts as a different<br>language from any of the dialects. (Westerners who learn Standard<br>Arabic to an advanced level and travel to Egypt find they can't<br>understand anything anybody is saying, just like Egyptians who can<br>speak Standard Arabic and travel to Morocco.) So are people's<br>intuitions about their native Arabic dialect any more relevant to<br>Standard Arabic than a French person's intuitions about Latin?<br><br>Also, the way people use Standard Arabic is clearly influenced by<br>their native dialect, and not only because they tend to mix the two<br>(my impression from watching Arabic satellite TV is that, except when<br>people are reading aloud, mixing the two is the norm[1]). When<br>Egyptian writers like Tawfiq Al Hakim and Naguib Mahfouz wrote<br>dialogue in Standard Arabic, sometimes they literally translated<br>expressions from the Egyptian dialect. The result is Standard Arabic,<br>but the meaning might not be clear to someone who doesn't know the<br>Egyptian dialect. (In order to understand the meaning, you have to<br>translate back into Egyptian.)<br><br>So it seems to me that Standard Arabic has to be seen as something<br>like Global English, i.e. the English of non-native speakers, which<br>varies between different populations, partly under the influence of<br>their native language. Yes, people do have intuitions about their<br>second language, but clearly there's a difference between those<br>intuitions and their intuitions about their native language. What<br>kind of linguistic and/or cognitive theory could account for that<br>difference?<br><br>Ben<br><br>[1] I think Walter Armbrust makes a good sociological observation<br>about the reasons for this mixing in Armbrust, Walter, _Mass Culture<br>and Modernism in Egypt_, chapter 3 ("The split vernacular", pp.<br>37-62). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.<br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">--------------------------------------------------------------------------</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">End of Arabic-L: 09 Jan 2008</div></body></html>