"Be" and Equational Sentences in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic

Author: Mohamed Sami Anwar

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1979-01-01

Total Pages: 135

ISBN-13: 9027230013

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The volume attempts to deal with equational sentences in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and their remote structure. In this unique monograph Mohamed Sami Anwar oes to show that equational sentences in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic are derived from underlying sentences that have transitive or intransitive verbs and that the verb be in its overt form is only a tense marker. The chapter following the introduction deals with the equational sentences functioning as conveyers of stative ideas. The third chapter deals with the verb be in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and how it functions only as a tense marker. The fourth chapter is an analysis of determination as regards the subject and why in some cases the predicate, at the surface structure, has to occur before the subject. The final chapter deals with the predicate slot and its types of fillers, and analyzes also the remote structure of the equational sentences to interpret the phenomenon of the presence and absence of agreement in number and gender between the subject and the predicate.

Information Structure in Spoken Arabic
Information Structure in Spoken Arabic

Author: Jonathan Owens

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-03

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1135968403

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Spoken Arabic is different in many respects from literary Arabic. This book is concerned with speakers’ intentions and the structural and pragmatic resources they employ. Based on new empirical findings from across the Arabic world this work will be of interest to both students and researchers.

Structure and Function of the Arabic Verb
Structure and Function of the Arabic Verb

Author: Maher Bahloul

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-08-07

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1135981620

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Structure and Function of the Arabic Verb is a corpus-based study that unveils the morpho-syntax and the semantics of the Arabic verb. Approaches to verbal grammatical categories - the constituents of verbal systems - often rely on either semantic-pragmatic or syntactic analyses. This research bridges the gap between these two distinct approaches through a detailed analysis of Taxis, Aspect, Tense and Modality in Standard Arabic. This is accomplished by showing, firstly, some basic theoretical concerns shared by both schools of thought, and, secondly, the extent to which semantic structures and invariant meanings mirror syntactic representations. Maher Bahloul’s findings also indicate that the basic constituents of the verbal system in Arabic, namely the Perfect and the Imperfect, are systematically differentiated through their invariant semantic features in a markedness relation. Finally, this study suggests that the syntactic derivation of verbal and nominal clauses are sensitive to whether or not verbal categories are specified for their feature values, providing therefore a principled explanation to a long-standing debate. This reader friendly book will appeal to both specialists and students of Arabic linguistics, language and syntax.

Structure and Function: From clause to discourse and beyond
Structure and Function: From clause to discourse and beyond

Author: Christopher Butler

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 602

ISBN-13: 9781588113597

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Volume one of a two volume set outlining and comparing three approaches to the study of language labelled 'structural-functionalist': functional grammar (FG); role and reference grammar (RRG); and systemic functional grammar (SFG).

Communicative Organization in Natural Language
Communicative Organization in Natural Language

Author: Igor? Aleksandrovi? Mel??uk

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 9789027230607

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The book defines the concept of Semantic-Communicative Structure [= Sem-CommS]-a formal object that is imposed on the starting Semantic Structure [= SemS] of a sentence (under text synthesis) in order to turn the selected meaning into a linguistic message. The Sem-CommS is a system of eight logically independent oppositions: 1. Thematicity (Rheme vs. Theme), 2. Givenness (Given vs. Old), 3. Focalization (Focalized vs. Non-Focalized), 4. Perspective (Foregrounded vs. Backgrounded), 5. Emphasis (Emphasized vs. Non-Emphasized), 6. Presupposedness (Presupposed vs. Non-Presupposed), 7. Unitariness (Unitary vs. Articulated), 8. Locutionality (Communicated vs. Signaled). The values of these oppositions mark particular subnetworks of the starting SemS and thus allow for the distinction between sentences such as (a) A man killed a dog vs. The dog was killed by a man, (b) John washed the window vs. It was John who washed the window or (c) It hurts! vs. Ouch! The proposed Sem-Comm-oppositions are conceived as an attempt at sharpening the well-known notions of Topic ~ Comment, Focus, etc. Possible linguistic strategies for expressing the values of the Sem-Comm-oppositions in different languages are discussed at some length, with linguistic illustrations.

Hypothetical Modality
Hypothetical Modality

Author: Debra Ziegeler

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2000-07-15

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9027298718

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This book marks a new development in the field of grammaticalisation studies, in that it extends the field of grammaticalisation studies from relatively homogeneous languages to those possessing well-established and institutionalised second language varieties. In Hypothetical Modality, special reference is made to Singaporean English, a native-speaker L2 dialect of considerable importance in the South-East Asian region, and to the expression in the dialect of hypothetical modality, which appears to be indistinguishable from non-hypothetical modality in terms of the use of preterite or past forms of modal verbs. Within a grammaticalisation framework, a number of factors can be seen to be relevant to an explanation, including substratum and contact features such as tense/aspect marking, levels of lexical retention as an individual (psychological) phenomenon, and the fact that such dialects have a discontinuity in their development. In addition, the book defines pragmatic approaches to the understanding of hypothetical modality, in both diachronic and synchronic terms.