Reviewed by Dimitrios Ntelitheos, United Arab Emirates University

A resource for the study of the language used in newspapers, books, broadcasts, and formal speech, this book provides a detailed description of the grammatical structure of Modern Literary Arabic. It contains thirty-nine chapters and an appendix of tables for verb conjugation paradigms.

The organization of the chapters does not relate to grammatical components or categories but rather to the level of difficulty in learning specific aspects of the grammar. This organization will be useful to those following a curriculum or learning as an independent study. The chapters on the Arabic script, transliteration, punctuation, handwriting, and pronunciation of consonants and vowels each provide extensive exercises on the Arabic alphabet as well as discussions of special cases and numerous examples.

Several chapters explore the nominal domain and include a discussion of nominal classes, definiteness and indefiniteness, gender, number (including a chapter on discontinuous plurals), free and bound pronominal forms (e.g. personal, demonstrative, reflexive, reciprocal, interrogative), the possessive construction, and derived nominals (e.g. participles, verbal nouns). Each discussion is supported by examples as well as practice sentences (which contain the Arabic script, its transliteration, and an English translation) and translation exercises. New Arabic words are marked with a superscript that indicates the English translation, which facilitates the translation process.

The chapters that investigate the verbal system of Arabic provide discussion of roots and radicals, trilateral verbs, aspect morphology (e.g. perfect and imperfect verbs), derived verb forms, transitivity, and mood morphology. Special chapters deal with classes of verbs with weak initial, middle, or final radicals; verbs of wonder; the negative copula; and verbs with special uses. As with the chapters on nouns, these sections provide extensive examples and translation exercises.

The remaining chapters examine grammatical categories such as conjunctions, prepositions, particles, adjectives (e.g. comparatives, superlatives, diminutives), cardinal and ordinal numbers, expressions of time, adverbs and adverbial phrases, circumstantial clauses, conditional sentences, and word order. Because some of these chapters provide a more general overview of the grammatical system, the exercises are more complex and require knowledge of the preceding chapters.

Arabic: An essential grammar is, as the title suggests, a practical reference guide to the structure of Formal Modern Arabic. It will be of use to students within the classroom as well as to independent learners of the language. Suitable for both beginners and intermediate students, this volume will provide a strong introduction to the complexities of the grammatical structures of Formal Modern Arabic.