Reviewed by Omaima Ayoub, Furqaan Academy

This volume includes nine papers that were presented at the Twenty-First Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, which was held in 2007 at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. The papers examine authentic data and cover a variety of topics in Arabic linguistics but have a considerable focus on pragmatics.

Zina Saadi’s contribution entitled ‘Orthographic unicode variations in Arabic: A case study of character occurrences in news corpora’ examines the problem caused by writers of Arabic who choose different Unicode characters to represent a particular Arabic letter, and the impact of this problem on the field of natural language processing. After demonstrating that there are three types of orthographic variations in Arabic Unicode, she calls for normalizing such variations in processed texts to reduce dictionary lookup errors.

In ‘Toward an LFG account of agreement mismatches of numerals within Arabic NPs’ Kamel Elsaadany adopts a lexical functional grammar approach in his investigation and supports the implementation of the INDEX versus CONCORD analysis over the two-tier approach in accounting for agreement mismatches in Standard Arabic noun phrases that contain numerals.

In ‘A text-pragmatic approach to moot questions in Arabic’ Reda Mahmoud analyzes a corpus of more than 400 moot questions collected from thirty-six arguments that took place on Arabic television programs. Mahmoud examines syntactic, lexical, and pragmatic features of these moot questions and concludes that the moderator uses them to stimulate more debate between the two participants on the show.

Mustapha Mughazy’s ‘The pragmatics of denial: An information structure analysis of so-called ‘emphatic negation’ in Egyptian Arabic’ argues that emphatic negation is a pragmatic feature for denial in contrast to plain negation in Egyptian Arabic.

Jonathan Owens and Trent Rockwood’s ‘Yaʕni: What it (really) means’ examines the contextual meanings of the Arabic discourse marker yaʕni in a fairly large corpus of data to determine what it actually means in usage. The authors conclude that the meaning of yaʕni resides in its discourse organizing function.

In ‘Citations in Arabic legal opinion: Iftaa versus qadaa’ Ahmed Fakhry offers a valuable contribution on how cultural, rhetorical, and thought patterns are embedded into Arabic texts through a comparison of the legal language of religious and secular judges in Morocco.

Abderrahmane Zouhir’s ‘Language policy and factors influencing it in some Middle Eastern countries and Morocco’ describes the complex relations between cultural, historical, religious, and political ideologies and language policies in Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, and Morocco. Zouhir argues that identical policies work out differently according to varying forces in each country.

Selim Ben Said’s ‘The perception of Arab-accented speech by American native speakers and non-native speakers from East and South-East Asia’ examines attitudes to accented speech from a sociolinguistic perspective. The author analyzes data on the perception of Arab-accented speech (compared to Latino, East European, and Asian accented English) by native speakers of American English.

Finally, in ‘Linguistic losses in the translation of Arabic literary texts’, Hanada Al-Masri examines a number of short story translations from a semiotic/pragmatic perspective and illustrates the types of losses that occur in the translated text.