Campus Community Event for Thursday!! Title: Arabic Indefinites, Interrogatives and Negators: A linguistic history of western dialects. Speaker: Dr. David Wilmsen, American University of Beirut Time: Thursday Oct 3 2:00-3:30, reception to follow Room: Marshall Building, rm 490 This lecture is co-sponsored by: School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies (MENAS) Center of Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) Center of Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy (CERCLL) Abstract In this talk, I present the results of a comprehensive survey of Arabic dialects in which the post-positive negator –š operates, usually in conjunction with the pan-Arabic pre-posed mā, as in katab ‘he wrote’ mā katab-š ‘he didn’t write’, but occasionally, in some dialects, with the post-positive marker alone. The facts of Arabic, that some dialects negate with a pre-posed mā alone, some with what is called ‘bipartite’ negation mā … š, and some with post-positive –š alone have invited comparisons with a similar process seen to be occurring in French, whereby the post-positive negator ne becomes associated with some emphatic particle – in this case pas < ‘step’ – and eventually, in some French vernaculars, with a post-positive pas alone. The French is usually adduced as the textbook case of the Jespersen’s cycle operating in some European languages, prompting some observers of Arabic to propose that the Jespersen’s cycle operates in Arabic, too, with the Arabic particle analogous to the French pas being a reanalysis of one of the Arabic words for ‘thing’: šayʾ. Investigation, however, reveals that the similarity between Arabic and French is purely superficial; that there is no evidence for a Jespersen’s cycle operating in Arabic; and that the source of the Arabic negation with –š lies in polar interrogation, for which evidence does, indeed, exist in various Arabic dialects, including, to varying degrees, Andalusi, Egyptian, Levantine, Maltese, and Tunisian, among others. The polar interrogative šī is itself derived from an existential particle, ultimately deriving from Proto-Semitic 3rd-person pronouns, such as, šu, ši, šunu. Supporting evidence for this comes from the West Semitic Modern South Arabian languages, which possess an existential particle and indefinite determiner śi analogous in form and function to that of the Arabic šī. With this established, it becomes possible to propose the operation of a different cycle in Arabic, the Croft’s cycle, which Croft himself calls a ‘negative-existential cycle’, and which begins with the negation of existential predicates (here, šī) with the verbal negator (mā); proceeding to a special negative existential predicate distinct from the verbal negator form, usually a contraction or fusion of the verbal negator and the positive existential form (Arabic māšī/miš/muš); thence to the negative existential form becoming the same as the ordinary verbal negator. This last step is, in fact, attested in some Arabic dialects; the Egyptian, documented in the literature: miš yi-xallī-ha ti-štaġal ‘He doesn’t allow her to work;’ in unpublished data from the Levant: miš bi-yi-ʿmil-u ḥawāǧiz ‘they don’t put up obstructions’ and miš bi-yi-ʿiǧib-ha ‘it doesn’t please her’ and from Maltese where the analogous construction is attested: mux jogħġbok lilha. A Proto-Semitic origin of the feature implies that the modern dialects retaining it descend from pre-Classical Arabic.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 04:29:10 +0000
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