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Arabic Linguistics - Online First
Online First articles are the published Version of Record, made available as soon as they are finalized and formatted. They are in general accessible to current subscribers, until they have been included in an issue, which is accessible to subscribers to the relevant volume
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Number agreement in South Iranian Arabic : Somewhere between Arabic and Farsi
Author(s): Amina Harambašić and Dina El ZarkaAvailable online: 20 February 2026show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for: show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for:AbstractThis paper examines agreement with plural controllers in Gulf Arabic dialects spoken in South Iran through two complementary studies. Results show that the agreement system of Arabic is gradually converging toward the Persian system. However, this shift varies by the sociolinguistic context between the investigated communities. The results highlight the role of contact intensity in shaping morphosyntactic change and contribute to our understanding of language change in minority-majority language contact scenarios.
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Quadriliteral comparatives in Arabic
Author(s): Dua Abu Elhija and Stuart DavisAvailable online: 24 November 2025show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for: show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for:AbstractIn most dialects of Arabic the comparative (elative) seems to be derived by taking a base adjective and mapping it to a template of the shape ʔaCCaC. A traditional constraint on the elative, noted in Wright’s A Grammar of the Arabic Language and in Girod (2011), is that it cannot be formed with a root containing four consonants nor can it incorporate affixal consonants. In this article, however, we illustrate the occurrence of such comparatives in southern Levantine Arabic, based on the Palestinian variety spoken natively by the first author and on native speaker consultations. We term these elatives “quadriliteral comparatives”. We argue that such comparatives are not based on an adjective or on an underlying root, but on a corresponding dialectal verb form that usually has the prefix [ʔit-]. Their meaning is typically evaluative rather than objective. We offer a formal analysis in the framework of Construction Morphology.
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A case study of the features and functions of the Syrian discourse marker lak
Author(s): Bettina Leitner and Pia MadlenerAvailable online: 02 October 2025show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for: show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for:AbstractThis article presents the first small-scale corpus- and questionnaire-based case study of the Syrian Arabic lak. We investigate the nature of lak as a discourse marker as well as its specific functions by analysing corpus data and referring to previous studies on discourse markers. Our corpus data derives from two sources: the Syrian TV series əl-fuṣūl əl-ʔarbəʕa (‘The Four Seasons’) and the Syrian podcast əl-žahəbaḏ (‘The Connoisseur’). The questionnaire designed for this study was conducted with three native speakers of Syrian Arabic and provides the basis for a native speakers’ perception of the functions and characteristics of lak and thus provides information complementary to that gathered via literature review and corpus analysis. Comparison of our corpus data with previous studies on discourse markers in Arabic and in other languages shows that lak fulfils the criteria for being defined as a discourse marker and shares many commonly occurring discourse marker functions, such as marking boundaries in discourse, expressing attitudes, or signalling emotional involvement of any kind.
The paper also briefly discusses possible origins and cognate forms of lak and elaborates various syntactic characteristics of lak, such as its main collocations and in which sentence types it appears most in our data.
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