Overview

Justice's first aim in this volume is to demystify the Arabic language, which is widely perceived as difficult to learn, and has been characterised as ambiguous and confusingly polysemous. The central concern of this three-dimensional portrait of Classical Arabic is a version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language is a determinant of other aspects of culture. But rather than focusing on the possible influences of language on thought, Justice is intersted in connections between language and language use or langue and parole. Among the topics treated are: the difficulty of Arabic; morphosyntax and Whorfian semantics; the role of duality in Arabic; iconicity; a population profile of vocabulary; the syntactic cut' of Arabic; and the relation between causatives and verbs that ascribe qualities to an object. This erudite and thought-provoking volume will be of interest not only to Arabists but to linguistic anthropologists in general.

Full Product Details

Author:   David Justice
Publisher:   John Benjamins Publishing Co
Imprint:   John Benjamins Publishing Co
Volume:   15
Weight:   0.920kg
ISBN:  

9789027230164

ISBN 10:   9027230161
Pages:   417
Publication Date:   01 January 1987
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In stock  
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Table of Contents

1. Introduction; 2. Part One: An overview of the language; 3. Chapter 0: Definition of the language of study; 4. Chapter 1: The difficulty of Arabic; 5. Chapter 2: Thumbnail sketches of Arabic; 6. Part Two: Theoretical questions: Aesthetics and form; 7. Chapter 3: The form-use connection; 8. Chapter 4: The grammar of duality and the duality of grammar; 9. Part Three: Form of the lexicon; 10. Chapter 5: L'Arbitraire du signe; 11. Chapter 6: Accumulation; 12. Chapter 7: Enantiosemantics; 13. Chapter 8: Nouns of manner; 14. Part Four: Form in syntax; 15. Chapter 9: The shape of syntax; 16. Chapter 10: Pleonasm; 17. Chapter 11: Specification; 18. Chapter 12: Causatives and ascriptives; 19. References; 20. Indices

Reviews

This volume makes important points about Arabic and about how languages acquire their textures. -- Barbara Johnstone, Texas A&M University, in Language 64:4 (1988)

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