[Corpora-List] Recommended journals or conferences for an article on historical Arabic syntactic theory?

[Kais Dukes]

Hi,

First off, let me say that I'm an enthusiastic reader of the Corpora List, and I've learnt a lot from reading the many interesting posts over the last few years.

I'm writing to ask for people's recommendations on a suitable journal or conference venue for a specific paper I'm looking to write. I know that some people like to write up a paper first, and then look for a venue, but my own personal approach is to have a general outline in mind, in then tailor the paper to the specific venue. I'm looking to write a paper on the historic syntax of traditional Arabic grammar (known as i'rab) and how this grammar has recently been translated into a hybrid treebank that combines aspects of both constituency and dependency grammar (available at http://corpus.quran.com). See an example hybrid parse tree here:

http://corpus.quran.com/treebank.jsp?chapter=6&verse=76&token=7

Although traditional Arabic grammar started it's development many centuries ago, it talks about the roles that morphemes, words and phrases have in a sentence (e.g. subject, object, apposition, etc). There are a finite set of roles in the grammar, and rules that specify what types of morpheme and phrase can take different syntactic roles. I have interpreted this grammar as a modern computational treebank (The Quranic Arabic Dependency Treebank). I would like to write a Journal article that describes the challenges faced in mapping this historical grammar (with examples) into a modern computational framework, any why we felt the need to use a hybrid approach instead of a pure dependency or pure constituency framework for the syntax. Here are the sort of Journals I've been thinking about:

1. Arabic Journal (by Brill) - This is good because it's focus is Arabic and Islamic studies, but I'm not sure that a paper on detailed linguistic theory will be applicable.
2. Research on Language and Computation (Springer) - Looks like a great Journal, but has a computational focus?
3. Journal of Linguistics (Cambridge University Press) 

The problem I'm having is that I want to talk about the computational model we have developed based on traditional Arabic grammar, but I also want to delve into the details of specific linguistic constructions, and discuss how these have been handled in detail in the original historical grammar. Usually I've got no problem in choosing conferences/journals for publications, but for some reason, this time I'm a bit lost as to exactly what Journal may be the best venue for this specific paper.

In a sense, this paper would be about bringing the ideas of historical Arabic grammar to a modern audience. Any suggestions / advice would be more than welcome! Also, any pointers on turn-around time, or how long it takes for such Journals to come back with feedback would be great. I would imagine this paper would be more linguistically focused, i.e. a discussion of the syntactic theory of historical Arabic grammar, and how we have interpreted it in more modern computational frameworks. There are some interesting linguistic constructions to discuss in the hybrid dependency/constituency representation, such as conjunction.

Looking forward to any suggestions for suitable Journals or conferences!

Kind Regards,

Kais Dukes
Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Language Research Group
Institute University of Leeds
http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/nlp

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