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This volume is the first of its kind to deal with the relation between Arabic and the media. It focuses on close analyses of examples of media Arabic (code-switching, language variation, orthography and constructions of identity), and also offers approaches to the use of media for teaching Arabic.

This book explores speakers’ intentions, and the structural and pragmatic resources they employ, in spoken Arabic – which is different in many essential respects from literary Arabic. Based on new empirical findings from across the Arabic world this book elucidates the many ways in which context and the goals and intentions of the speaker inform and constrain linguistic structure in spoken Arabic. This is the first book to provide an in-depth analysis of information structure in spoken Arabic, which is based on language as it is actually used, not on normatively-given grammar. Written by leading experts in Arabic linguistics, the studies evaluate the ways in which relevant parts of a message in spoken Arabic are encoded, highlighted or obscured. It covers a broad range of issues from across the Arabic-speaking world, including the discourse-sensitive properties of word order variation, the use of intonation for information focussing, the differential role of native Arabic and second languages to encode information in a codeswitching context, and the need for cultural contextualization to understand the role of \"disinformation\" structure. The studies combine a strong empirical basis with methodological and theoretical issues drawn from a number of different perspectives including pragmatic theory, language contact, instrumental prosodic analysis and (de-)grammaticalization theory. The introductory chapter embeds the project within the deeper Arabic grammatical tradition, as elaborated by the eleventh century grammarian Abdul Qahir al-Jurjani. This book provides an invaluable comprehensive introduction to an important, yet understudied, component of spoken Arabic. 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 . 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 .

Islamism in Egypt is more diversified in terms of its sociology and ideology than is usually assumed. Through linguistic analysis of Islamist rhetoric, this book sheds light upon attitudes towards other Muslims, religious authority and secular society. Examining the rhetoric of three central Islamist figures in Egypt today - Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Amr Khalid and Muhammad Imara - the author investigates the connection between Islamist rhetoric and the social and political structures of the Islamic field in Egypt. Highlighting the diversity of Islamist rhetoric, the author argues that differences of form disclose sociological and ideological tensions. Grounded in Systemic Functional Grammar, the book explores three linguistic areas in detail: pronoun use, mood choices and configurations of processes and participants. The author explores how the writers relate to their readers and how they construe concepts that are central in the current Islamic revival, such as 'Islamic thought', 'Muslims', and 'the West'. Introducing an alternative divide in Egyptian public debate - between text cultures rather than ideologies - this book approaches the topic of Islamism from a unique analytical perspective, offering an important addition to the existing literature in the areas of Middle Eastern society and politics, Arabic language and religious studies.

\"This lively introduction to the linguistics of Arabic provides students with a concise overview of the language's structure and its various components: its phonology, morphology and syntax. Through exercises, discussion points and assignment built into every chapter, the book presents the Arabic language in vivid and engaging terms, encouraging students to grasp the complexity of its linguistic situation\"-- Provided by publisher.

Arabic, one of the official languages of the United Nations, is spoken by more than half a billion people around the world and is of increasing importance in today's political and economic spheres. The study of the Arabic language has a long and rich history: earliest grammatical accounts date from the 8th century and include full syntactic, morphological, and phonological analyses of the vernaculars and of Classical Arabic. In recent years the academic study of Arabic has become increasingly sophisticated and broad. This state-of-the-art volume presents the most recent research in Arabic linguistics from a theoretical point of view, including computational linguistics, syntax, semantics, and historical linguistics. It also covers sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and discourse analysis by looking at issues such as gender, urbanization, and language ideology. Underlying themes include the changing and evolving attitudes of speakers of Arabic and theoretical approaches to linguistic variation in the Middle East.

By examining Arabic legal opinions, Ahmed Fakhri seeks to understand how the organization of these texts accomplishes specific social goals. In doing so, he hopes to illuminate socio-cultural practices among those who produce and use these texts. Like other sociolinguistics projects, this manuscript unites texts with their social contexts. Fakhri also points out that legal texts have traditionally held an important place in Arabic culture and therefore provide an especially illuminating window into the broader realm of Arabic thought and culture.

Grounding in English and Arabic News Discourse explores the discourse notion of grounding (viz. the foreground-background structure), and examines it in the various structures that occur in short news texts. A text-level approach to grounding and the differentiation between several core concepts relating to the various textual and non-textual structures, distinguish the book from other approaches in the field.A corpus-based analysis focuses on sentence-initial expressions and examines the grounding-signalling function of several markers in both English and Arabic. The analysis captures constraints on the occurrence of particular markers, and the extensive illustrative examples explain the strategies that writers employ to cope with problems of recasting grounding-values in news texts. The author also shows how the failure to signal appropriate grounding-values is likewise associated with the failure to deliver the appropriate type of text.Grounding is a relatively unexplored area of investigation in Arabic (text)linguistics, and the study identifies a series of previously unrecognized language features, highlighting the discourse pragmatic function that syntax serves.The book will be invaluable to researchers and students of discourse, pragmatics, contrastive rhetoric, and communication. It will also be of interest to all those involved in translation and intercultural studies.