Bøker av Martin Kramer

Presents a series of case studies, some based on groundbreaking research and others on provocative analysis, that correct misinformation clouding the public's understanding of the Middle East. Martin Kramer also offers a forensic exploration of how misinformation arises and becomes "fact".

Vowel Harmony and Correspondence Theory covers the major issues in the generative analysis of vowel harmony and vowel harmony typology. The book offers an economical account of the most prominent features of vowel harmony systems (root control, affix control, dominance, vowel opacity, and neutrality) within the framework of optimality theory, extending the notion of correspondence to the syntagmatic dimension.The book contains a typological overview of vowel harmony patterns, an introduction to the basics of optimality theory including some of its most recent extensions and detailed studies of harmony systems in 10 languages from a variety of language families.

At the heart of generative phonology lies the assumption that the sounds of every language have abstract underlying representations, which undergo various changes in order to generate the 'surface' representations; that is, the sounds we actually pronounce. The existence, status and form of underlying representations have been hotly debated in phonological research since the introduction of the phoneme in the nineteenth century. This book provides a comprehensive overview of theories of the mental representation of the sounds of language. How does the mind store and process phonological representations? Kramer surveys the development of the concept of underlying representation over the last 100 years or so within the field of generative phonology. He considers phonological patterns, psycholinguistic experiments, statistical generalisations over data corpora and phenomena such as hypercorrection. The book offers a new understanding of contrastive features and proposes a modification of the optimality-theoretic approach to the generation of underlying representations.

Over the past decade, the political ground beneath the Middle East has shifted

Provides a critical assessment of the contradictions of Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, and the misrepresentation of both in the West. This book argues that Arab nationalism - the so-called Arab awakening - bore within it the seeds of its own failure. Arabism as an idea drew upon foreign sources and resources.