This volume brings together ten peer-reviewed articles on Arabic linguistics. The articles are distributed over three parts: phonetics and phonology, sociolinguistics and pragmatics, and language acquisition. Including data from North African, Levantine, and Gulf varieties of Arabic, as well as Arabic varieties spoken in diaspora, these articles address issues that range from phonetic neutralization and diminutive formation to diglossia, dialect contact, and language acquisition in heritage speakers. The book is valuable reading for linguists in general and for those working on descriptive and theoretical aspects of Arabic linguistics in particular.

• Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXXI
• Editorial page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Phonetics and phonology
• Incomplete phonetic neutralization
  • 1. Introduction
    • Incomplete neutralization
    • Possible causes of incomplete neutralization
    • The spreading activation hypothesis
    • Research gaps
  • 2. Studies of phonetic neutralization in Arabic
    • Vowel epenthesis, and possible influence of sociolinguistic variation
    • Closed syllable shortening
    • Unstressed vowel shortening
    • No effect of orthography
    • Does incomplete neutralization have a functional role?
  • 3. Towards a spreading activation analysis for Arabic
    • Arabic morphology and the mental lexicon
    • Which words share timing patterns?
    • Representation of alternations: Evidence from priming
    • Representing vowel alternations in the lexicon
  • 4. Conclusion and future directions
  • Acknowledgement
  • References
• Diminutive formation in a Libyan dialect with some phonological implications
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Brief description of the diminutive in Classical Arabic and two other varieties
    • The diminutive in Classical Arabic
    • The diminutive in contemporary Arabic dialects
    • The diminutive in Coastal Dhofari Arabic
    • The diminutive in Moroccan Arabic
  • 3. Diminutive in the rural Asābʽā dialect of northwest Libya
  • 4. Some phonological issues
  • 5. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Diminutive and augmentative formation in northern Najdi/Ḥā’ili Arabic
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Background on Najdi Arabic
  • 3. Diminutive and augmentative in Arabic
  • 4. Some connotations of the augmentative in the HD
  • 5. Morphological diminutive and augmentative in Ḥā’ili dialect
    • The diminutive in HD and CA
    • Diminutive and augmentative forms in HD
    • Monosyllabic base words
    • Disyllabic base words
    • Trisyllabic base words
    • Base words with more than four root consonants
    • The Diminutive with [aj] infix and its augmentative form
    • Summary
  • 6. Conclusion
  • References
• Post-lexical strata
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Theoretical background
  • 3. The interaction between syncope and resyllabification
    • Overview
    • Ali’s (2014) account of phrasal syncope in UCSA and Shukriiya
    • Anchor 198
  • 4. A Stratal-OT account of the interaction between syncope and resyllabification
    • Lexical syncope
    • Post-lexical syncope
    • Summary
  • 5. Further evidence for post-lexical stratification
  • 6. Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Anchor 206
• Part II. Sociolinguistics and pragmatics
• Destabilizing Arabic diglossia?
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Background
    • Complicating common understandings of diglossia
    • The turn toward considering translingual practice
    • The emergent register of interactive written discourse
  • 3. Methods
  • 4. Some representative data
  • 5. Discussion
  • 6. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Dialect contact in the Tunisian diaspora
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The Tunisian community of Mazara del Vallo (Sicily)
  • 3. Data and methodology
  • 4. Dialect leveling in speakers from Chebba
    • The /q/ variable
    • Interdental phonemes /θ/, /ð/ and /ðʕ/
    • The etymological diphthongs /ay/ and /aw/
  • 5. Discussion
  • 6. Conclusions
  • References
• Speaker-oriented attitude datives as authority indexicals
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. What is authority and how is it indexed?
  • Anchor 125
  • 4. The sociocultural context of ba:b l-ħa:ra
  • 5. SP-ADs, family interactions, and indexicality
  • 6. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgement
  • References
• Generic expressions in Tunisian Arabic
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Generic expressions in Arabic
    • An overview
  • 3. Previous work on generic demonstratives
  • 4. The current study
    • Generics expressed with the demonstrative hāk
    • The demonstrative hāk
      • Morphosyntactic and cognitive status features
    • Methodology
    • General constraints
    • Category variability
    • Level of categorization
    • Prototypicality
  • 5. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
• Part III. Language acquisition
• Palestinian Arabic dual formation in typically developing heritage speakers of Palestinian Arabic
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Arabic and English pluralization systems: An overview
    • Arabic vs. English pluralization systems: Structural characteristics and differences
    • Arabic number categories and monolingual acquisition
    • Experimental hypotheses and predictions
  • 3. Experimental study
    • Participants
    • Materials
    • Procedure
  • Results
    • Dual marking performance
    • Correlations
    • Summary
  • 5. Discussion
    • Future research and implications
  • 6. Conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
• Interactions between temporal acoustics and indexical information in speech rate perception
  • 1. Introduction
    • Background
    • Speech rate in production
    • Speech rate in perception
    • Current study
  • 2. Methodology
    • Materials
    • Stimuli recording
    • Stimuli preparation and design
    • Acceleration vs. deceleration
    • Pausing
    • Design
    • Participants
    • Lists, tasks, and procedure
  • 3. Results
    • Overall patterns from both tasks
    • Statistical analysis
  • 4. Discussion
  • 5. Conclusions
  • References
• Index