The Arabic Language

faʿala
, 
faʿila
, 
faʿula
, see Dichy (2007) and 
below, Chapter 7, p. 118. Eisele (1999) presents a detailed analysis of the tense/
aspect system of an Arabic dialect (Cairene), with a general introduction to the 
theory of aspect. An interesting treatment of aspect and tense in Arabic in the 
framework of Functional Grammar is in Cuvalay (1996). Reese (2011) discusses the 
function of the participle in Moroccan Arabic, and compares this with general 
developments in the Arabic dialects.
The most recent analysis of the system of verbal measures is in Larcher (2012: 
43–106). On diathesis and the system of the verbal measures, see Saad (1982), who 
discusses the semantic relations between transitivity, the causative measure and 
the passive, and Le Tourneau (1996). Retsö’s (1989) approach is more morpho-
logical and comparative across the Semitic languages; Leemhuis (1977) deals in 
detail with the verbal measures II and IV in Qurʾānic Arabic. 
For Arabic syntax, Reckendorff’s manuals (1895–8, 1921) are still valuable 
research tools. Nöldeke’s studies on Arabic grammar (1897) contain important 
additions to the existing grammars; they were re-edited by Spitaler together with 
Nöldeke’s marginal notes (1963). 
Syntax remains the main area in which general linguists have dealt with 
Arabic. Early attempts to apply a general linguistic framework to Arabic go back 
to the 1970s and 1980s; most of these worked within a generativist/transfor-
mational framework, for example, Khalafallah (1969, Saʿīdī Egyptian dialect); 
Hartmann (1974; transformational/generative); Khuli (1979; contrastive grammar 
Arabic–English on a transformationalist basis); Ayoub (1981); Fassi Fehri (1982; 
government and binding). Moutaouakil (1989) uses a different framework, that 
of functional grammar.

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106
The Arabic Language
More recently, most syntactic studies of Arabic have adopted a Principles and 
Parameters or a Minimalist framework. It would be impossible to give a full biblio
-
graphical treatment of all the studies that have appeared. A general survey of 
Arabic syntax within a Minimalist framework and covering all major aspects of 
Arabic syntactic structure at the sentential level was published by Aoun, Benma
-
moun and Choueiri (2010). Fassi Fehri (1993) and Benmamoun (2000) provide an 
introduction to the theoretical framework and deal with a number of syntactic 
topics. Mohammad (1999) deals with the syntax of Standard and Palestinian 
Arabic. Shlonsky (1997) compares the syntactic structure of Arabic and Hebrew; 
see also the papers in Ouhalla and Shlonsky (2002).
An excellent summary of the structure of the noun phrase and the verb phrase 
in Standard Arabic is by Hoyt (2008a, 2009a); see also his analysis of nominal 
clauses and verbal clauses (2008b, 2009b); for the noun phrase, see also Kremers 
(2003). For the construct state, see Siloni (1997); for the construct state in Semitic 
languages, see Shlonsky (2004); for the 
maṣdar 
in the construct state, see Kremers 
(2003: 121–55). For agreement, see Aoun, Benmamoun and Choueiri (2010: 73–95).
On negation, see the Minimalist approach in Ouhalla (2002); for an analysis 
in the framework of Lexical-Functional grammar, see Alsharif and Sadler (2009); 
see also Aoun, Benmamoun and Choeiri (2010: 96–126). On negation in Egyptian 
Arabic, see Woidich (1969).
The topic of pseudo-verbs and verbless sentences is dealt with by Eid (1991) 
and, especially in Maltese, by Peterson (2009).
For the theories about polarity agreement of the numerals, see Brugnatelli 
(1982); for the theories of the Arabic grammarians about the numerals, see Druel 
(2012).
A new development altogether is that of computational linguistic studies 
dedicated to Arabic, which use the large corpora of Arabic that have been 
assembled. The most important are those of Modern Standard Arabic, with an 
emphasis on newspaper texts. One of the largest corpora is that coordinated by 
Tim Buckwalter, which works with a morphological parser, see www.qamus.org. 
The Bibliotheca Alexandrina has initiated a project to compile an international 
corpus of Arabic (ICA), available at: http://www.bibalex.org/unl/Frontend/
Project.aspx?id=9. For the compilation of a tagged corpus, the Penn Arabic 
Treebank, see Smrž 
et al
. (2007) and a report from 2003/4 by Mohamed Maamouri, 
Anne Bies, Tim Buckwalter and Hubert Jin, available at: http://www.research-
gate.net/publication/228693973_The_penn_arabic_treebank_Building_a_large-
scale_annotated_arabic_corpus.
On the one hand, development is occurring very quickly, especially in the 
domains of automatic speech recognition and translation; on the other hand, one 
may safely say that the advantages of corpus research have not yet been employed 
to the fullest. For a recent survey of Arabic corpus linguistics, see Ditters and 
Hoogland (2006); for computational studies about Arabic, see Ditters (2013).

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