30.230, Review: Semitic; Discourse Analysis; Morphology; Syntax: Sjörs (2018)

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Subject: 30.230, Review: Semitic; Discourse Analysis; Morphology; Syntax: Sjörs (2018)

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Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2019 20:16:36
From: David Wilmsen [david.wilmsen at gmail.com]
Subject: Historical Aspects of Standard Negation in Semitic

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-481.html

EDITOR: Ambjörn  Sjörs
TITLE: Historical Aspects of Standard Negation in Semitic
SERIES TITLE: SSLL 91
PUBLISHER: Brill
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: David Wilmsen, American University of Sharjah

SUMMARY

The book Historical Aspects of Standard Negation in Semitic, as author Ambjörn
Sjörs describes it, presents a synchronic, diachronic, and comparative
investigation of the expression of standard negation in Semitic. S defines
standard negation as the unmarked negation of declarative verbal main clauses,
adding that this definition provides a base for examining other types of
negative predications, such as negation of non-verbal clauses. It happens that
non-verbal main clauses regularly occur in Semitic languages.  

The book is organized into sixteen chapters in three parts, two chapters of an
introduction, eleven of analysis of the materials by individual language, and
three chapters of concluding discussion. 

Part 1 Introduction

1 Preliminaries

S explains his objectives, scope, and method as being a straightforward
comparative study, eventually leading to a reconstruction of the original
Semitic negator. He examines the expression of standard negation in the
Semitic languages, how that differs from other expressions of negation of
verbal clauses, how negated clauses differ from their affirmative
counterparts, and how the negative expressions in the Semitic languages
historically relate to each other. To accomplish this, he chooses languages,
as he says, based upon their genealogical and typological affiliation and upon
variation in the expression of standard negation in their texts. Drawing
material from texts is a necessity when examining extinct members of the
Semitic family. In this, it appears that he relies upon the work of other
researchers into those languages and their readings of those texts. No primary
materials are listed in the extensive bibliography. 

He does not confine himself to the so-called “big five,” those being Akkadian,
Classical Arabic, Aramaic, Classical Ethiopic, and Biblical Hebrew. Instead,
he samples a range of languages from the Semitic family tree (for a brief
introduction to which, see Rubin 2008). About that methodology he says:  

“It is not necessary to compare all languages of one family for the sake of
comparative linguistics, as long as the comparison is made on the same
genealogical node. The nodal depth assumed in this investigation is determined
by, among other things, the expression of negation: whenever there is
variation in the expression of standard negation within one group, the
variation prompts an investigation” (p. 6)  

This is a reasoned choice, inasmuch as concentrating on the big five while
ignoring other related languages misses much variability, and, as a result,
the opportunity for reconstruction. That variability is illustrated early in a
table (pp. 10–11), showing all the known Semitic languages and their negators.
For ease of reference, S places the names of the languages that he examines in
bold. Those are, in the order that he lists them the West Semitic languages
Biblical Hebrew, Phoenician, Ugaritic, Old Aramaic, Neo-Aramaic, and Quran
Arabic; the Ethiosemitic languages Tigre and Tigrinya, Amharic, Ancient
Harari, Modern Harari, Wolane, Silte, Gafat, Kistani, and Peripheral West
Gurage; the South Semitic languages Jibbali, Sabaic, and Minaic; and the East
Semitic languages Old Assyrian and Literary Old Babylonian. 

The chapter provides a review of the four main works about negation in Semitic
in general,
ending with an overview of some pertinent details about Semitic language
families.

2 On the Grammar of Negation

This is an overview of the typological literature on negation, clearly
identifying itself with the functional school of linguistics, relying
especially on the work of Dahl (1979 & 2010) and Miestamo (2005), adopting the
latter’s conceptions of symmetrical and asymmetrical negation: Symmetric
negative clauses do not differ from affirmative clauses other than by the
presence of the negator. Asymmetric clauses do. The chapter proceeds to a
discussion of non-standard negation and to the renewal of negation, in which S
concentrates upon the so-called “Jespersen cycle” (Dahl 1979: 88; van der
Auwera 2010), which does not seem to have occurred in Semitic languages with
the exception that it is widely believed to have occurred in some Arabic
dialects (Diem 2014). S also mentions here in passing another cyclic renewal
of negation, the so-called “Croft’s cycle” (more properly the negative
existential cycle [Croft 1991], or NEC). 

 Part 2 Presentation and Analysis of the Material

3 Old Assyrian and East Semitic

Akkadian is the longest attested Semitic language and the language of a world
civilization, which left an enormous number of texts, the earliest dating to
around 2,500 BC and the latest around 65 AD. Its major dialects are Assyrian
and Babylonian. 

The main negators in Akkadian are lā and ul[ā]. According to S, “one of the
most vexing questions with regard to the system of negation in Old Assyrian is
the functional distribution of lā and ulā and the historical background of the
latter” (p. 63). To readers unfamiliar with the dialogues within Semitics,
this vexation may seem puzzling. Several researchers - whom S acknowledges -
see it as a univerbation between standard negator lā and the common Semitic
conjunction /w/ ‘and’ arising from neither/nor constructions involving a
negator and a conjunction lā […] w lā […] ‘not […] and not […].’ It should not
seem unusual or problematic that a language attested over two and a half
millennia and longer might develop some new negators out of original patterns.
Here, a consideration of negative cycles might have been fruitful. But S does
not consider them.

4 Ugaritic

Ugaritic is a North Semitic language known almost entirely in texts from the
14th through the 12th century BC from the ruined city of Ugarit on the
northern coast of Syria. Its negators are either lā or ʔal. S identifies the
latter as a prohibitive; but, in the numbered examples, it appears more as a
negator of hortatives (let him not do…), also expressing negative consequence
clauses (lest he do…). Ugaritic also possesses a negator ʔin.

5 Standard Biblical Hebrew

Similar to Ugaritic, the most common negators in Biblical Hebrew are lā, in
Hebrew, realized as lō, and an allophone Ɂal-, the standard being lō. The
negator ʔal- is also often used in what S calls prohibition, but which, from
the numbered examples, again appears to mark dehortatives. S also engages in a
discussion of lō […] wa lō […] constructions. 

6 Phoenician

In Phoenician, there appear some innovative negators bl, ʔy ʔ(y)bl, along with
the by now familiar ʔl. Because the corpus of Phoenician texts is limited, the
origins of these are somewhat obscure. S appears to agree with others who
derive bl from bi-lā ‘without’ (< ‘with no’). For its part, ʔy may either be a
reflex of ʔal, or, as S prefers, a derivation from the wh- interrogative ʔayy.

7 Aramaic, Deir Alla, and Samalian

Aramaic texts first appear about 1000 BC. Much but not all of attested Aramaic
writing is in the dialect known as Syriac, which was to become the vehicle of
Eastern Christianity. Syriac was written from the 1st through the 7th
centuries AD, after which it went into rapid decline with the advent of Islam.
It is the second largest attested Semitic language in terms of number of
surviving texts. Aramaic is still spoken in a few small, disperse populations
to the present day. The negator in Aramaic is l or lh, and the prohibitive ʔal
also appears, again most often as a dehortative in the numbered examples. S
also discusses Western Neo-Aramaic, which possesses a negator ču in the
Ma’lula dialect of western Syria - and nowhere else - alongside lā. This is
probably a borrowing from Kurdish. As such, it does not aid in a
reconstruction of an original Proto-Semitic negator. Nor does it add anything
meaningful to an examination of variation in and between Semitic languages,
another stated goal of the book. It is not clear why it should be included in
the discussion at all. 

8 Quran Arabic

S chooses Quranic Arabic as the oldest extensive attestation of Arabic of any
variety. It possesses a wider range of negators than all other Semitic
languages that S examines, those being lā, lam, lan, mā, and ʔin. He devotes
most of his attention to lā and lam, deriving lam from lā and mā, the latter
of which is either an innovation of Western Semitic or of Arabic itself, which
exhibits by far the greatest number of attestations, it being the standard
negator of the numerous spoken dialects of Arabic. S concurs with the view of
earlier researchers that mā derives from a common Semitic wh- interrogative.
He seems oddly uninterested in lan, which, for its part, is the negator of
anticipatory predications (there is no true future tense in Arabic), and he
has hardly anything to say about ʔin, devoting one paragraph and a single
numbered example to it at the end of the chapter and another brief
consideration of it in Chapter 14 of the concluding discussion.    

9 Minaic, Sabaic, and Ancient South Arabian 

Ancient South Arabian (ASA) is the language of the civilizations of southern
Arabia in what is now Yemen, having left evidence of its existence in its
epigraphic writings, some of them found in the far north of the Peninsula. The
main negators are lhm (or lm), ʔl, and dʔ in later attestations.  

10 Jibbali and Modern South Arabian 

Jibbali is one of six Modern South Arabian (MSA) languages, called modern
because they still exist, and Arabian for the geographic location of (most of)
their speakers in the southern Arabian Peninsula. Neither it nor its sister
languages are descended from ASA. Their principal negators are ɔl and lv. MSA
negation is distinctive in that it appears at the end of the predicate rather
than preceding it. S assumes that this is a result of a Jespersen cycle (pp.
31 & 309), in his only mention of that outside the context of spoken Arabic.  
 

11 Tigre and Tigrinya 

The negators in these two languages are ʔI and ʔay, which S derives ultimately
from ʔal. 

12 Amharic and Harari 

Similarly, these possess negators al and aC. Here, S finally discusses some
negative asymmetries and non-standard negations, revisiting both in the
subsequent chapter. 

13 Gafat, Kistane, and Peripheral Western Gurage

These, too, possess negators al, ǝl, and aC. Peripheral Western Gurage also
possesses an. This should not be surprising, as [l] => [n] => [l] are regular
sound correspondences in Semitic.  

Part 3 Concluding Discussion

14 Innovative Expressions of Negation

S wraps up some theoretical matters such as collocation and univerbation with
focus particles; 
reanalysis of scale reversal contexts; collocation with markers of old
information; collocation with pro-sentential negators, and borrowing, the
latter largely applicable to Neo-Aramaic ču, borrowed from Kurdish; Gafat and
Kistani *tv-, a borrowing from Cushitic; and late Sabaic dʔ, which S supposes
may be a borrowing from Aksumite that spread by areal diffusion.  

15 Other Negators and Negative Asymmetries 

This chapter offers a brief, eight-page reiteration of some of the odds and
ends of non-verbal negators and asymmetries that S had addressed earlier.  

16 Reconstruction 

S concludes with a fairly predictable reconstruction, more or less asserting
what most already knew and what perhaps readers of this review can deduce
without knowing much about the Semitic languages: the original Proto-Semitic
standard negator can be reconstructed as lā. The others are innovations,
mostly on the same theme, but with some idiosyncrasies, not the least of which
is the Arabic mā.   

EVALUATION

I shall evaluate the worth of this book from the perspective of an Arabist and
a linguist. Its virtue lies in its synthesizing between two covers all or most
conventional thinking about standard negation in the Semitic languages and in
proposing an elegant but unsurprising reconstruction of the original
Proto-Semitic negator as lā. Its contribution is to offer a holistic,
systematically comparative investigation of the phenomena.

It will, however, remain inaccessible to linguists unfamiliar with Semitic
languages and the prevailing conversations, conventions, and controversies
involved in their study. S utilizes terminology familiar to Semiticists
without explanation, leaving the meaning opaque to those outside the field.
One example amongst many is his explanation of his shorthand for verbal
morphology, obviously of key importance in such a work:  

“Verbal grammatical morphemes are referred to by templates making use of prs
for East Semitic and qtl for West Semitic (by convention, rather than C1C2C3,
ḳtl, or k’tl ). Thus, for East Semitic, von Soden’s Präteritum, Präsens,
Stativ, Perfekt, and Imperativ, or Huehnergard’s preterite, durative, verbal
adjective, perfect, and imperative, are referred to as iprus, iparras, paris,
iptaras, and purus.  The West Semitic counterparts to iprus and purus are
referred to as yvqtvl and qvtvl” (p. xv)

Nor does he usually assist readers unfamiliar with Semitic languages with
interlinear glosses in the numbered examples, supplying them for Semitic
languages only in examples (1) and (2) and (9) of 326 examples, and even in
those, without identifying verbal morphology. In Semiticist writings, there
seems to be a common assumption that readers will be familiar enough with at
least one Semitic language sufficiently to understand the argumentation. These
and other Semiticist conventions would render the work almost if not
completely incomprehensible to general linguists.

So, too, would linguists likely find baffling the terminology that S uses in
reference to the many varieties of Arabic. He refers to “Old Arabic”,
“classical Arabic”, and “Arabiyya”, never explaining them. The latter, roughly
synonymous with “Old Arabic”, has largely fallen into disuse. Apparently, S
regards the first as being synonymous with Quranic Arabic, despite its being
only one of many varieties of Old Arabic. Indeed, Quranic Arabic should
properly be considered pre-classical Arabic, it serving as the basis for
classical Arabic, which term itself should correctly apply only to the
writings of statecraft and belles-lettres produced between the 7th and 13th
centuries with the flourishing of Arab/Islamic civilization. Descendants of
classical Arabic continue to be written to this day, making it the largest
textually attested Semitic language. 

The Arabic of writing must be distinguished from the spoken dialects of
Arabic, to which S consistently and erroneously refers as “Neo-Arabic” in a
haphazard discussion of the spoken varieties of Arabic, sure to confuse
uninitiated readers. The living language of some 300 million souls, spoken
Arabic has been described as being “highly divergent” from the Arabic of
writing, especially, as it happens, in techniques of negation and
interrogation. Here S is rather on the horns of a dilemma. He is largely
interested in reconstructing the original Proto-Semitic negator, but the
negator mā of the Arabic dialects contributes nothing to that. Yet can he
hardly ignore the Arabic dialects, together constituting the largest living
Semitic language. 

As it happens, negation in spoken Arabic is symmetrical, the difference
between affirmative perfective and imperfective verbal predications and
negative lying only in the presence of the negator mā and sometimes lā. On the
other hand, negation in Quranic Arabic and most Arabic writing since the 7th
century is largely asymmetric. In writing, regardless of time-frame, all verbs
are imperfective, with lā negating the present indicative verb; lan negating
futurity, with the verb in the present subjunctive; and lam negating past time
in an apocopate present-tense verb. Negation with mā occurs under delimited
circumstances. S does not address this dichotomy between the Arabic of writing
and the Arabic of speech. 

That, too, hardly matters to the reconstruction of an original Proto-Semitic
negator, and there seems to be no real point for introducing symmetry and
asymmetry in negation except for the sake of thoroughness. The same is true of
the cursory treatment of linguistic cycles, which S discusses precisely in the
context of some Arabic dialects, which affix –š onto the verb, in the
construction mā  + V + š, echoing the pervasive - but incorrect - sentiment
that it instantiates a stage II of a Jespersen cycle. This, too, appears to be
a perfunctory mention of the phenomenon for the sake of completeness.  

Such inclusivity is characteristic of dissertations, whose writers are obliged
to demonstrate to their readers that they are thoroughly familiar with the
relevant research on their subjects. It should be edited out of a book. The
fault lies with the publisher and the author alike. S admits early on that the
book is a revision of his doctoral dissertation, researched and written
between 2011 and 2015, with revisions - presumably for publication - carried
out between 2016 and 2017. Yet, does he miss relevant writings published
throughout that period. For example, he mentions a key work in Semitic studies
(Kogan 2015), published, he says, too late for consideration (p. 22, note 13),
even though he would have had a year in which to consider it. For another, he
mentions the NEC briefly in the context of his treatment of the Jespersen
cycle. This especially with reference to the spoken Arabic non-verb negator
miš, derived from mā and an existential particle šī. Remarking that it can
sometimes negate verbal predicates, he observes, “the reasons for this
reanalysis are not entirely clear” (p. 58). Here he cites the scholar Ljuba
Veselinova (2009), who has studied the NEC extensively. Yet he misses her most
important works on the matter, those being her 2013, 2014, and 2016 articles.
What is more, he ignores work on the NEC in Arabic, Håland (2011) and Wilmsen
(2014: 173–176), even though an Arabist whose work he cites repeatedly, Werner
Diem, acknowledges Håland’s work (2014: xii), and he has apparently read at
least parts of Wilmsen 2014, citing it alongside Diem on page 28. Otherwise,
he has hardly anything at all to say about a negative existential cycle,
except for some speculation about a possible manifestation of one of Croft’s
types in Ugaritic (p. 131). He might just as well have left the entire
discussion aside. 

Such lapses are perhaps excusable in a dissertation; but they are inexcusable
in a book. I have not read Sjörs’s dissertation, but I have read both the
dissertation and number 87 in the same Brill series under which the current
title is listed (Davy 2013 & 2016 - reviewed in Linguist List 28.4574),
finding hardly any difference between one and the other. I warrant that this
would be true of Sjörs’s book and dissertation, too. The editorial board of
the Brill series is remiss in not demanding a substantial rewriting of theses,
as the better academic publishers do. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that
Brill is acquiring the reputation for publishing any Semitic language study
that is submitted to it.   

Even with its gaps in the recent literature, this is a fine dissertation, but
it is, for the reasons stated, disappointing as a book. It will be a useful
reference for Semiticists. Even then, a thoroughgoing examination of all
expressions of negation, standard and non-standard negation, would have been
of greater interest. On the other hand, except that it does provide a Semitic
context for Arabic and an overview of the literature of negation in Semitic,
it will be of little added use to Arabists, for whom the internal matters of
negation are already well known. It will likely prove nearly incomprehensible
and therefore largely unusable to general linguists.   

REFERENCES

van der Auwera, Johan. 2010. On the Diachrony of Negation. In Laurence Horn
(ed.) The Expression of Negation, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 73–109.

Croft, William. 1991. The evolution of negation. Journal of Linguistics.
27(1), 1–27.     

Dahl, Östen. 1979. Typology of Sentence Negation. Linguistics, 17: 79–106.

Dahl, Östen. 2010. Typology of Negation. In Laurence Horn (ed.) The Expression
of Negation, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 9–38.

Davey, Richard J. 2013/2016. Coastal Dhofari Arabic: A sketch grammar. PhD
dissertation, Manchester University/Leiden: Brill. 

Diem, Werner. 2014. Negation in Arabic: A Study in Linguistic History.
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Håland, Eva Marie. 2011. miš yinfaʿ a change in progress? A study of extended
usage of the negation marker miš in Cairene Arabic. MA thesis, University of
Oslo. 

Kogan, Leonid. 2015. Genealogical Classification of Semitic: The Lexical
Isoglosses. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Miestamo, Matti. 2005. Standard Negation: The Negation of Declarative Verbal
Main Clauses in a Typological Perspective. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter.

Rubin, Aaron. 2008. The Subgrouping of the Semitic Languages. Language and
Linguistics Compass 2, 61–84.

Veselinova, Ljuba. 2009. “Standard and Special Negators in the Slavonic
Languages: Synchrony and Diachrony.” In Björn Hansen and Jasmina Grković-Major
(eds.) Diachronic Slavonic Syntax: Gradual Changes in Focus. Vienna: Kubon and
Sagner, 195–208.

Veselinova, Ljuba. 2013. Negative existentials: A cross-linguistic study.
Rivista di Linguistica 25/1. 107–145. 

Veselinova, Ljuba. 2014. The negative existential cycle revisited. Linguistics
52/6, 1327–1389.

Veselinova, Ljuba. 2016. The Negative Existential Cycle viewed through the
lens of comparative data. In Elly van Gelderen (ed.) Cyclical Change
Continued. Amsterdam/New York: John Benjamins.

Wilmsen, David. 2014. Arabic Indefinites, Interrogatives, and Negators: A
linguistic history of western dialects. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

David Wilmsen is Head of the Arabic and Translation Studies Department at the
American University of Sharjah. He has spent more than twenty-five years in
the Arabophone world, first at the American University in Cairo then at the
American University of Beirut before coming to the United Arab Emirates. He
has researched the grammaticalization of Arabic object markers,
interrogatives, negators, and existential particles. He is currently
researching participial pronominal object marking and the grammaticalization
and use of existential particles in the dialects of Emirati Arabic and has
recently begun a long-term project in documenting the dialect geography of
Emirati Arabic.





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