Arabic-L:LING:Word Order and Generative Grammar

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Wed 09 Jan 2008
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject:Word Order and Generative Grammar

-------------------------Messages-----------------------------------
1)
Date: 09 Jan 2008
From:"Benjamin Geer" <benjamin.geer at gmail.com>
Subject:Word Order and Generative Grammar


>  3) if we go with 1)a)ii) then we clash with every Arab speakers  
> native
>     intuition [...]
> I don't see how you can explain even the simplest facts without
> having a formalism that allows the researcher to model mixed lects.

I agree, but I think there's more to it than that.  Since Standard
Arabic isn't anyone's native language, can you talk about people's
intuitions about it in the same way that you talk about their
intuitions about their native language?

Moreover, if the boundaries between languages are determined by mutual
comprehensibility, surely Standard Arabic counts as a different
language from any of the dialects.  (Westerners who learn Standard
Arabic to an advanced level and travel to Egypt find they can't
understand anything anybody is saying, just like Egyptians who can
speak Standard Arabic and travel to Morocco.)  So are people's
intuitions about their native Arabic dialect any more relevant to
Standard Arabic than a French person's intuitions about Latin?

Also, the way people use Standard Arabic is clearly influenced by
their native dialect, and not only because they tend to mix the two
(my impression from watching Arabic satellite TV is that, except when
people are reading aloud, mixing the two is the norm[1]).  When
Egyptian writers like Tawfiq Al Hakim and Naguib Mahfouz wrote
dialogue in Standard Arabic, sometimes they literally translated
expressions from the Egyptian dialect.  The result is Standard Arabic,
but the meaning might not be clear to someone who doesn't know the
Egyptian dialect.  (In order to understand the meaning, you have to
translate back into Egyptian.)

So it seems to me that Standard Arabic has to be seen as something
like Global English, i.e. the English of non-native speakers, which
varies between different populations, partly under the influence of
their native language.  Yes, people do have intuitions about their
second language, but clearly there's a difference between those
intuitions and their intuitions about their native language.  What
kind of linguistic and/or cognitive theory could account for that
difference?

Ben

[1] I think Walter Armbrust makes a good sociological observation
about the reasons for this mixing in Armbrust, Walter, _Mass Culture
and Modernism in Egypt_, chapter 3 ("The split vernacular", pp.
37-62).  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

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