1st Edition
Information Structure in Spoken Arabic
Introduction: The once and future study of information structure in Arabic: from Jurjani to Grice - Jonathan Owens. 1: Explaining null and overt subjects in spoken Arabic - Jonathan Owens, Bill Young, Trent Rockwood, David Mehall, Robin Dodsworth. 2: Word order and textual function in Gulf Arabic - Clive Holes. 3: Information structure in the Najdi dialects - Bruce Ingham. 4: Word order in Egyptian Arabic: form and function - Malcolm Edwards. 5: The information structure of existential sentences in Egyptian Arabic - Mustafa Mughazy. 6: The pragmatics of information structure in Arabic: colloquial tautological expressions as a paradigm example - Mohammed Farghal. 7: From complementizer to discourse marker: the functions of ’inno in Lebanese Arabic - Marie Aimée Germanos. 8: The (absence of) prosodic reflexes of given/new information status in Egyptian Arabic - Sam Hellmuth. 9: Moroccan Arabic—French codeswitching and information structure - Karima Ziamari. 10: Conversation markers in Arabic—Hausa codeswitching: saliency and language hierarchies - Jonathan Owens, Jidda Hassan. 11: Understatement, euphemism, and circumlocution in Egyptian Arabic: cooperation in conversational dissembling - David Wilmsen.
Biography
Jonathan Owens is Professor of Arabic Linguistics at Bayreuth University, Germany. He has published extensively on many aspects of Arabic linguistics; his most recent publications include Arabic as a Minority Language and A Linguistic History of Arabic. Alaa Elgibali is Professor of Arabic and Linguistics at the University of Maryland, USA. He is the author of several seminal publications, including Arabic as a First Language: A study in language acquisition and development, and is associate editor of the four-volume Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics.
"By and large, the studies in this ground-breaking volume have opened a new vista on the significant subject of information structure, and will be of immense value to all students of Arabic and comparative linguistics who are interested in intercultural interaction of pragmatic ideas in modern linguistic scholarship." - Amidu Olalekan Sanni, Lagos; Zeitschrift fuer Arabische Linguistik (Journal of Arabic Linguistics), 57, 2013, pp. 91-94 (2013).
