Reviewed by Chentir Amina, Université de Provence, France

This volume includes twelve papers presented at the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics held in Alexandria, Egypt in May 2003 and at the University of Oklahoma in March 2004.

In the first paper, John J. McCarthy argues that together, the richness of the base (ROTB) and optimality theory are able to resolve the indeterminacy of the underlying ‘Length of stem-final vowels in colloquial Arabic’. McCarthy shows that controversy over the length of Arabic final vowels disappears once the phenomena are examined from the perspective of ROTB and a typologically responsible set of linguistic constraints.

Abdessatar Mahfoudhi, ‘Moraic syllable structure and edge effects in Arabic’, studies the variation of moraic syllable structure, with a focus on edge-related syllables in Cairene, Makkan, and Tunisian dialects of Arabic. Mahfoudhi adopts a modified version of remote-licensing with a direct attachment of all edge-related consonants to the syllable in Arabic. This allows an array of alignments constraints to be dispensed with.

Khaled Rifaat presents a preliminary description of the intonation of Modern Standard Arabic in ‘The structure of Arabic intonation: A preliminary investigation’. To emphasize its structural simplicity, Rifaat provides a description of the basic elements and rules of the complete intonational sentence and concludes with a call for more work on different styles of Arabic to verify this generalization about the simplicity of Arabic intonation.

In ‘Phonological processes in connected speech in Colloquial Egyptian Arabic’, Hanaa Salem focuses on the description of between-word processes in Colloquial Egyptian Arabic. Salem shows that a number of processes, such as elision, shortening, germination, and assimilation apply with different frequencies of occurrence.

Lazhar Zanned deals with polysemy in ‘Root formation and polysemic organization in Arabic lexicon: A probabilistic model’. Using a probabilistic model that focuses on polysemy, morphology, and the different devices working to minimize the phenomenon of polysemy, Zanned argues that the rules governing root formation generate polysemy in an unavoidable way.

In ‘Light verbs in Standard and Egyptian Arabic’, Amr Helmy Ibrahim provides a review of modern and traditional Arabic linguistic analyses of the distribution of verbal and nominal predicates. He discusses the semantic and pragmatic interpretations of constructions that use or do not use light verbs. Ibrahim also shows that the lexical origins of light verbs vary crosslinguistically.

Mustafa A. Mughazy, ‘Rethinking lexical aspect in Egyptian Arabic’, argues for four aspectual classes of verbs in Egyptian Arabic: statives, achievements, activities, and accomplishments. He presents a series of morphological and syntactic diagnostics that definitively specify the aspectual nature of any given verb.

In ‘Building a computational lexicon for Arabic: A corpus-based approach’, Sameh Al-Ansary discusses a corpus-based approach to Arabic that  depends on analyzing a set of authentic contemporary data (1500 entries), building the tools required for the analysis tasks, and then extracting lexical entries in the required formalism.

In ‘Political transition, linguistic shift: How a political communiqué (bayaan) has come to be what it is’, Naima Boussofara-Omar claims that the process by which linguistic choices and valuations are made—and in which language ideologies are produced—in political speeches is as important as their context. For example, the author concludes that in political speeches in Tunisia, authority will not accrue to fuṣħaa (i.e. Standard Arabic) users unless they obey its grammatical rules and pragmatic appropriateness.

Heidi Lorimor considers semantic agreement effects in Arabic in ‘Agreement alternations: How optional patterns of agreement arise’. She examines data from Arabic first conjunct agreement to show that these postverbal agreement alternations are not consistent with the patterns explained by a psycholinguistic model of national agreement.

In ‘Acquisition of Arabic word formation: A multi-path approach’, Fatima Badry investigates cognitive and typological predispositions employed in the development of lexical derivational processes by Moroccan Arabic speaking children. Badry shows that the root is a real mental construct and that the road to lexical derivation involves multiple paths.

In the final paper, ‘L2 acquisition of Arabic morphosyntactic features: Temporary or permanent impairment?’, Mohammad T. Alhawary discusses the status of Universal Grammar access and the nature of second language competence—or ultimate attainment—in adult monolingual English and French speakers learning Arabic as a second language. He concludes that the evidence supports a modified temporary impairment view.