{"id":1136,"date":"2010-12-09T10:00:28","date_gmt":"2010-12-09T08:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=1136"},"modified":"2010-09-24T09:46:54","modified_gmt":"2010-09-24T07:46:54","slug":"etude-contrastive-arabefrancais","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=1136","title":{"rendered":"\u00c9tude contrastive Arabe\/Fran\u00e7ais"},"content":{"rendered":"
\u00c9tude contrastive Arabe\/Fran\u00e7ais:<\/strong> Cas de la relative. By Houriya Bouarich<\/strong>. (Languages of the world 36.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2008. Pp. 132. ISBN 9783895862274<\/a>. $76.30.<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Ferid Chekili<\/strong><\/a>, Sultan Qaboos University<\/em><\/p>\n

The book is intended as a comparative study of relatives in Arabic and French. One of Houriya Bouarich\u2019s aims is to show that relatives in Arabic and French are characterized by a number of syntactic phenomena, including definiteness, anaphora, and adjectivisation, and to compare the Arabic relative as traditionally defined to the French relative.<\/p>\n

The book consists of an introduction, four chapters, and a general conclusion followed by a general bibliography, an Arabic bibliography, and a short glossary. Ch. 1 provides a historical survey of Arabic grammar and sentence structure. B argues that Arabic grammatical thinking is shaped by its origin in two rival schools, Kufa and Basra, whose subsequent filiation into a number of distinct schools caused vast terminological variability. She also discusses the traditional distinction between nouns, verbs, and particles and attempts to locate relative pronouns within this classification.<\/p>\n

Ch. 2 addresses the status of relatives as embedded clauses and the nature and etymological origin of the relative pronoun in Arabic. This is followed by a comparative description of relative pronouns in French and Arabic. Considering the function of the relative pronoun she notes that as Arabic, unlike French, does not distinguish subject from object relatives, it uses a resumptive pronoun for this function, from which she concludes that they do not necessarily occupy the same position in the sentence.<\/p>\n

In Ch. 3, B discusses the anaphoric nature and distribution of the resumptive pronoun in Arabic and deals with the conditions under which different types of resumptive pronouns may be omitted. In Ch. 4, B reviews the literature on the relationship between relatives and adjectives, and then treats the formal and functional differences between relatives and adjectives in French and Arabic. Finally, comparing relatives and adjectives in terms of definiteness, she concludes that, although similar in function, they are not identical.<\/p>\n

The book at times demonstrates an obvious lack of generalization, reminiscent of more traditional descriptions (e.g. 38\u201340), as well as some ambiguity in its analysis. For example, although B describes the well-known contrast between \u2018topicalisation\u2019 and \u2018focusing\u2019 (78), she does not use these terms or refer to the associated literature. Similarly, in 3.1.3 she shows that resumptive pronouns occur in different types of sentences containing relative clauses, where it would have been enough to say that they occur wherever relativization occurs. Finally, B often treats certain aspects as inherent to relativization when in fact they are entirely independent: for example, that gender is doubly marked in sentences containing relatives (92) is simply a general characteristic of Arabic agreement.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, B\u2019s attempt to reconstitute and organize Arab grammarians\u2019 views of relatives yields a fairly comprehensive description of relativization in Arabic, as well as an interesting comparison with French.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00c9tude contrastive Arabe\/Fran\u00e7ais: Cas de la relative. By Houriya Bouarich. (Languages of the world 36.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2008. Pp. 132. ISBN 9783895862274. $76.30. Reviewed by Ferid Chekili, Sultan Qaboos University The book is intended as a comparative study of relatives in Arabic and French. One of Houriya Bouarich\u2019s aims is to show that relatives […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1136"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1137,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136\/revisions\/1137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}