26.4374, Review: General Ling; Lang Acq; Neuroling; Socioling: Khamis-Dakwar, Froud (2014)

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Subject: 26.4374, Review: General Ling; Lang Acq; Neuroling; Socioling: Khamis-Dakwar, Froud (2014)

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Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2015 17:31:13
From: Asmaa Shehata [asm.shehata at gmail.com]
Subject: Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXVI

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-4478.html

EDITOR: Reem  Khamis-Dakwar
EDITOR: Karen  Froud
TITLE: Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXVI
SUBTITLE: Papers from the annual symposium on Arabic Linguistics. New York, 2012
SERIES TITLE: Studies in Arabic Linguistics 2
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Asmaa Shehata, University of Calgary

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

The edited volume provides selected papers from the Arabic Linguistics Society Annual Meeting that was held in New York in 2012. This volume aims to present innovative data and questions in the field of Arabic linguistics that are addressed in terms of distinct approaches, and analyses. Apart from an introduction and two papers of the keynote speakers, the book is divided into six main sections (11 chapters): Syntax, Phonology, Sociolinguistics, Semantics/ Pragmatics, Language Acquisition and Neurolinguistics. Chapters are organized thematically, which allows readers to read chapters independently of others.

In the introductory chapter, Reem Khamis-Dakwar and  Karen Froud display an outline of the central themes in the volume and provide a brief overview of each article and how innovative data creatively analyzed to address novel research questions. Although articles focus on different topics that are investigated via different approaches, they all share an emphasis on illuminating the indispensable role of Arabic linguistic research in the study of human language and on catalyzing future research; this serves as a unifying theme to this volume. Besides the concept of innovation, the notion of diversity is also highlighted. 

In Chapter 2, ‘The development of future participles and future tense markers from motion predicates: Semantic, morphsyntactic and structural reduction’, Jamal Ouhalla presents an analysis of data from Moroccan Arabic. In particular, the chapter describes how motion participles (i.e., gadi ‘goion’ and maʃi ‘going’ in Moroccan Arabic develop into future tense markers that pass through a  process of development similar to the Palestinian participle rayħ ‘going’ into a future participial. The given analysis claims that the language system comprises, on one hand, the Lexicon that includes abstract and universal morphsyntactic primitives, and on the other hand, a Vocabulary that contains language-specific features such as morphology, phonology and syntax. The chapter concludes with implications for the proposal, which not only add to the grammaticalization knowledge and morpheme derivational function, but also to the comprehension of human language processes and represen
 tations. 

Chapter 3 entitled, ‘Yod-dropping in b-imperfect verb forms in Amman’ by Enam Al-Wer, uses data collected via sociolinguistic interviews from two groups of participants living in West Amman: native Jordanian and urban Palestinian Arabic speakers. More specifically, this study examines the conjugation of 3rd person singular and plural verb forms with or without /j/ produced by three generations. Findings reveal innovative patterns of conjunction used in the new dialect of Amman such as the reduction in the number of verb forms, from five forms (/bjiħki/, /biħki/, /bja:kul/, /bo:kil/, and /ba:kul/) to four forms (/biħki/, /bja:kul/, /bo:kil/, and /ba:kul/).  

Section 1, Syntax, presents five chapters in which different approaches and methods are drawn upon to explore distinct issues in Arabic syntax. In Chapter 4 titled ‘Prosodic constituency and locality
in Levantine Arabic: Long-distance negative concord’, Frederick Hoyt deals with an issue of negative concord that has long been at the center of syntax of Roman and Slavic languages, namely negative concord in Southern Levantine Arabic (i.e., Palestinian and Jordanian dialects) and whether there is a relationship between its syntactic constraints and the prosodic characteristics of negative concord sentences. Besides introducing data and a novel approach for analyzing it (i.e., a multi-dimensional approach that includes structural and acoustic analyses), comparative cross-linguistic data from Italian, German and Japanese are also discussed. The discussion shows evidence that negative concord in Levantine Arabic is licensed by prosodic locality restrictions rather than syntactic res
 trictions. 

Chapter 5, ‘Negation and the subject position 
in San’ani Arabic’, is coauthored by Elabbas Benmamoun and Khaled Al-Asbahi and aims at examining contemporary linguistic approaches in the context of sentential negation using data from a number of Arabic varieties: San’ani Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic. Unlike Moroccan Arabic that relies on head movement in negation, both San’ani and Standard Arabic varieties opt for cliticization. Cliticization is also introduced as a possible account for the diachronic rise of the negation element ‘laysa’ in Classical Arabic. In conclusion, the two authors present unanswered questions to be considered in future research such as reasons behind the movement of the subject to the specifier of the negative head and why San’ani and Moroccan Arabic do not follow a similar pattern with reference to sentential negation. 

In Chapter 6, ‘Splitting Neg: The morphosyntax of sentential negation in Cairene Egyptian Arabic revisited’, Usama Soltan introduces a novel analysis of the distribution of sentential negation patterns in Cairene Egyptian Arabic that takes into account their morphsyntactic characteristics. Based on a discussion of two main approaches of the position of negation on the clausal hierarchy: the low-Neg analysis accepted by Benmamoun (2000), Ouhalla (2002) and Aoun et al. (2010) and the high-Neg analysis adopted by Diesing and Jelinek (1995) and Soltan (2007), the proposed analysis provides empirical evidence of the adequacy of the high-Neg analysis. Useful implications of the novel analysis are discussed within the frame of a split-domain account for variation in negation strategies across different Arabic varieties and new questions for future work are introduced. 

The Feature Inheritance (FI) approach proposed by Chomsky (2007, 2008, and 2013) is challenged in Chapter 7, ‘Multiple agreement in Arabic’ by Hamid Ouali, with respect to Arabic data. The paper investigates multiple subject verb agreement in complex tense clauses in Arabic showing the inadequacy of Chomsky’s FI proposal to account for Arabic multiple agreement contexts that have no overt C head. Adopting Soltan’s analysis of simple SVO and VSO sentences, Ouali provides evidence that T can be lexically specified for φ-features in Arabic complex tense clauses. Not only does the proposed analysis have empirical implications for the study of other Arabic dialects, but other languages as well.

Using Classical Arabic data, Martin Walkow in Chapter 8, ‘Cyclic AGREE derives restrictions on cliticization in classical Arabic’, investigates the distinct set of clitic restrictions in verbal contexts. In his re-evaluation of the present operation of AGREE shown in Nevins’s (2007), Walkow demonstrates the failure of the Multiple AGREE to account for restrictions on combinations of third person clitics in Classical Arabic. In contrast to the existing analyses, the proposed analysis allows clarity and parsimony in theoretical frameworks accounting for detected superficial variability. 

Section 2 features two articles that discuss two different phonological issues. In Chapter 9, ‘Secondary stress exist in Cairene Arabic?’, Rajaa Aquil argues against the idea that Cairene Arabic (CA) does not have a secondary stress. After introducing background about the stress in Arabic in general and in CA in particular, the author underlines the theoretical nature of her paper that does not present any empirical data or analysis. On the contrary, Aquil validates the existence of secondary stress in CA by invoking a number of high-ranked Optimality Theoretic (OP) constraints:  TROCHAIC, FOOTBINTARITY, ALIGN-HEAD-/R, WSP, CLASH, and LAPSE. The author concludes that it is for future research to empirically verify the truth of the theoretical claim addressed in this chapter.

In contrast, Chapter 10, ‘Paradoxical paradigms! Evidence from Lebanese Arabic phonology’, by Haddad and Wiltshire, presents an empirical study that analyzes data from Lebanese Arabic. The chapter primarily explores the role of both Base-Output constraints and Optimal Paradigm constraints in determining the phonological structures of members in derivational paradigms. To this end, the two authors look at four types of verbs in Lebanese Arabic (LA): sound, geminate, hollow and defective. The authors provide empirical evidence that the Optimal Paradigm constraints can be operative in derivational paradigms as well as inflectional paradigms. Having discussed eight derivational paradigms of verbs in LA with dative and causative clitics, the author demonstrates that seven of them clearly satisfy the Optimal Paradigm constraints. The approach used in this analysis is an innovative one that accounts for distinct data cross-linguistically.

Section 3 deals with Sociolinguistics, Chapter 11, ‘The Arabic of Bukhara: A Principal parts analysis of the effects 
of contact influence on morphological typology’ by Kerith Miller, explores contact effects between Semitic, Indo-Aryan, and Turkic varieties. In order to achieve her goal, Miller uses Principal Parts Analysis to the verbal system of Bukhara Arabic data coming from stories collected between 1935 and 1943. The results reveal that the verbal system of Bukhara Arabic only retains salient elements in the Arabic verb pattern system such as Form II as transitive and Form IV as passive. However, the root and pattern derivation processes are less salient. For comparison purposes, the chapter ends with a recommendation to apply the principal parts analysis to other varieties of Arabic. 

Section 4, under the theme of Semantic/ Pragmatics, Chapter 12, ‘Terms of endearment and anger 
in Levantine Arabic: Praying for and against someone’ by Mohammad A. Mohammad, discusses the so-called God wishes that refer to those expressions of anger and compliment. In a response to Ferguson’s challenge (1997) which claimed that writing the grammar of “God-wishes” –kinship forms- would likely require years of research, this chapter provides a thorough description of the grammar of these structures in Arabic using data extracted from Arabic TV series broadcasts over the last fifteen years that also cover a big number of Arabic varieties such as Modern Standard Arabic, Syrian Bedouin Arabic, Cairene Arabic, Jordanian Arabic, Lebanese Arabic, Damascene Arabic, Emirati Arabic, Upper Egyptian Arabic and Saudi Arabic. Mohammad also proposes a well-defined explanation for the uniqueness of the grammar of these expressions. The author ends by presenting a list of properties of 
 God-wishes based on his proposed grammatical framework.

Section 5 concerns second language acquisition. Chapter 13, ‘On the L1 development of final consonant clusters in Cairene Arabic’ by Marwa Ragheb and Stuart Davis, examines the phonological acquisition of word-final consonant clusters of two siblings at the age of 2 years 8 months learning their first language (L1) (i.e., Cairene Arabic) in a monolingual setting. To this end, two tasks are used: eliciting data through pictures (where infants are asked to search for, or identify certain animals, objects, etc.) and a spontaneous speech task in which each child is separately engaged with the first author in telling stories or describing particular events. Four important results are reported: the early acquisition of the final consonant clusters in Cairene Arabic, the infrequency of consonant deletion, the use of germination as a “repair” strategy for unattained clusters, and certain patterns of errors in production of final consonant clusters and their preservation. The chapter 
 concludes with linking findings to the larger debate in the nature of the phonological acquisition process, and directions for future research are provided.

In Section 6, Neurolinguistics, Reem Khamis-Dakwar and Karen Froud present the final chapter; ‘Neurocognitive modeling of the two language varieties in Arabic Diglossia’, that starts with defining and explain two important terms that will be used throughout the chapter: diglossia and cognitive neuroscience domain. Then the authors introduce the electroencephalography (EGG) method that measures brain waves, and its three main applications to Arabic diglossia (i.e., mismatch negativity (MMN), N400 and P600). In the second part of the article, the preliminary neurocognitive studies for Arabic diglossia are thoroughly presented and their major findings are entirely underscored. Furthermore, the two authors suggest a novel mental model of process, which can associate the cognitive relationship between syntactic and lexical aspects of Arabic diglossia. This approach is seen as a promising initial method for generating new approaches. In this section, the authors also stress the scarcit
 y of studies that investigate diglossia in Arabic using neurocognitive methodologies; more specifically those neurophysiological and behavioral studies that explore the syntactic systems in Arabic diglossia.  The chapter ends with recommendations for future research in this area.

EVALUATION 

This edited volume is innovative in terms of the research areas that it covers and the theoretical frameworks. Drawing upon a variety of theoretical approaches (semantics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, multi-dimensional, syntactic analysis, cognitive linguistics along with others), the papers explore different data in different linguistic areas, which are expected to inspire numerous new research papers in the field. 

This volume is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, it not only examines certain theoretical approaches in the light of Arabic data such as Chomsky’s Feature Inheritance approach (Chapter 2) and Nevins’s AGREE operation (Chapter 8), it refines existing analyses like negative concord (Chapter 4) as well. Secondly, the book introduces the groundwork for novel research questions and future empirical work (Chapter 6 and Chapter 9). Thirdly, it fills gaps in the research base of Arabic linguistics and presents empirical evidence in relation to existing research questions in the field such as giving a detailed analysis of the kinship structures that are first introduced by Ferguson in 1997 (Chapter 12). Fourthly, it features aspects of Arabic language acquisition (Chapter 13) that are raely discussed in second language research (Alhawary, 2013). Another strength of this volume is the large amount of collected data that covers a wide range of Arabic varieties including written va
 rieties (i.e., Standard Arabic) and colloquial spoken dialects (e.g. Moroccan, Cairene, Jordanian, San’ani and Bukhara Arabic). 

This volume also sheds light on areas of Arabic linguistic research that are still in their infancy. This is clearly demonstrated in Chapter 9, Chapter 11, and Chapter 14. Khamis-Dakwar and Froud (Chapter 14) examine language representation and processing in Arabic diglossia using neurocognitive methodologies. It seems, however, that the goal of developing these methodologies has not been achieved so far. Nevertheless, the debate and innovation promoted in this volume could benefit the neurocognitive methodologies.

Although this collection of papers is a thorough resource that addresses profound questions, there are a number of unclear references that sometimes make it difficult to follow the presented argument. For instance, the vague use of acronyms in Ouali’s study (Chapter 2) where the author has made use of certain abbreviations (i.e., MA, JA and SA) over 10 times without identifying once the Arabic varieties they stand for. For instance, it is not clear whether SA refers to Standard Arabic or Saudi Arabic or Sudanese Arabic. It is very confusing for unspecialized readers, especially non-native speakers of Arabic. Thus, it would be advisable to include a glossary in future editions that contains all the acronyms and abbreviations used in the book. 

Overall, Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXVI discusses several linguistic sets and presents a good introduction to the field of Arabic linguistics for those unfamiliar with it, but it can also be of interest to experienced scholars. These studies renew our knowledge, bring fresh insights and solutions to existing theoretical challenges and open doors for future research. 

REFERENCES

Alhawary, M. (2013). Arabic second language acquisition research and second language teaching: what the teacher, textbook writer, and tester need to know. Al-‘Arabiyya, 46, 23-35.

Aoun, J., Benmamoun, E., and  Choueiri, L. (2010). The syntax of Arabic. The UK: Cambrige University Press.

Benmamoun, E. (2000). The feature structure if functional categories: A comparative study of Arabic dialects. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chomsky, N. (2007). Approaching UG from below. In U. Sauerland, and  H. M. Gartner (Eds.), Interfaces + recursion= language? Chomsky’s minimalism and the view from syntax-semantics (pp. 1-29). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 

Chomsky, N. (2008). On phases. In R. Freidin, C. Otero, and  M. L. Zubizarreta (Eds.), Foundational issues in linguistic theory (pp. 133-166). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Chomsky, N. (2013). Problems of projection. Lingua, 18, 1-35. 

Diesing, M., and  Jelinek, E. (1995). Distributing arguments. Natural Language Semantics, 3(2), 123-176. 

Ferguson, C. (1997). God-wishes in Syrian Arabic. In R. K. Belnap, and  N. Haeri (Eds.), Structuralist studies in Arabic Linguistics: Charles Ferguson papers, 1954-1994 (pp. 212-228). La Haye/New York/ Cologne: Brill.

Nevins, A. (2007). The representation of the third person and its consequences for person-case effects. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 25, 273-313. 

Ouhalla, J. (2002). The structure and logical form of negative sentences in Arabic. In J. Ouhalla, and  U. Shlonsky (Eds.), Themes in Arabic and Hebrew syntax (pp. 299-320). Dordrecht: Kluwer academic Publishers.

Soltan, U. (2007). On formal feature licensing in minimalism: Aspects of Standard Arabic morpho-syntax. PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Asmaa Shehata, is a faculty at the University of Calgary, Linguistics, Languages and Cultures Department. Her research interests include second language phonology with particular focus on cross language speech perception and production.

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