Arabic-L:LING:New Article on Word Order in Arabic

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Fri 08 May 2009
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1) Subject:New Article on Word Order in Arabic

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1)
Date: 08 May 2009
From: "Prof. Jonathan Owens" <jonathan.owens at uni-bayreuth.de>
Subject:New Article on Word Order in Arabic

new article on word order in Arabic:

2009. Owens, J., Robin Dodsworth and Trent Rockwood. “Subject-Verb Order
in Spoken Arabic: Morpholexical and Event-based Factors”. /Language
Variation and Change/. 21: 39-67.

A B ST RAC T
This article explores the relationship between the global functions of
variable
subject-verb order and morpholexical class of subjects in the spoken
Arabic of
the Arabian peninsula. Using corpus-based methods, it is shown that
lexical class
—pronoun, pronominal, noun—definiteness, and the discourse-defined  
lexical
specificity of a noun all correlate significantly with subject-verb or
verb-subject
word order. The global function of the two orders is explored using an
array of
measures to show that verb-subject order prototypically presents events,
while
subject-verb signals available referentiality. Using the quantitatively
based study of
Anthony Naro and Sebastiao Votre ([1999]. Discourse motivations for
linguistic
regularities: Verb/subject order in spoken Brazilian Portuguese. Probus
11:75–
100.) on Brazilian Portuguese as a point of comparison, a typological
framework is
developed for understanding languages with variable subject-verb order.

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