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This book presents a comprehensive portrait of "Kit b S bawayhi." It offers new insights into its historical and linguistic arguments and underlines their strong correlation. The decisive historical argument highlights al- ra s role not only as the centre of pre-Islamic Arabic culture but also as the matrix within which early Arab linguistics grew and developed. The "Kit b" s value as a communicative grammar forms the crux of the linguistic argument. The complementarity of syntax and pragmatics is established as a condition sine qua non for S bawayhi s analysis of language. The benefits of a complementary approach is reflected in the analysis of nominal sentences and related notions of ibtid and definiteness. The pragmatic principle of identifiability is uncovered as the ultimate determiner of word order.

Drawing on the recent discussions on Middle Arabic and Mixed Arabic, this book offers a comprehensive survey of the various fields of Muslim, Jewish and Christian Arabic texts (folklore, religious and linguistic literature) as well as the matters of mixed language and diglossia.

Morphemes combined with the Arabic noun exhibit many puzzling properties, still unaccounted for in the literature. This book proposes a new, unified explanation, analyzing these morphemes as copulae, with the constructions in which they occur as instances of predication

The Arabic script in Africa is a collection of sixteen papers on the past and present use of Arabic script to write African languages other than Arabic, discussing the (ethno-)historical, (socio-)linguistic, and in particular grammatological aspects of such writing traditions.

This volume contains twenty case studies analysing various aspects of language contact involving ancient and modern Semitic languages.