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This book studies the micro-variation in the syntax of negation of Southern Levantine, Gulf and Standard Arabic. By including new and recently published data that support key issues for the syntax of negation, the book challenges the standard parametric view that negation has a fixed parametrized position in syntactic structure. It particularly argues for a multi-locus analysis with syntactic, semantic, morphosyntactic and diachronic implications for the various structural positions. Thus accounting for numerous word order restrictions, semantic ambiguities and pragmatic interpretations without complicating narrow syntax with special operations, configurations or constraints. The book includes data from Southern Levantine, Gulf and Standard Arabic, which shed light on word order contrasts in negative clauses and their interaction with tense/aspect, mood/modality, semantic scope over adverbs, and negative sensitive items. It also has new data challenging the standard claim in Arabic linguistics literature that negation has a fixed parametrized position in the clause structure. The book brings a new perspective on the role of negation in licensing negative sensitive items, scoping over propositions and interacting with pragmatic notions such as presupposition and speech acts.

In the study of word formation, the focus has often been on generating the form. In this book, the semantic aspect of the formation of new words is central. It is viewed from the perspectives of word formation rules and of lexicalization. Each chapter concentrates on a specific question about a theoretical concept or word formation process in a particular language and adopts a theoretical framework that is appropriate to the study of this question. From general theoretical concepts of productivity and lexicalization, the focus moves to terminology, compounding and derivation. The theoretical frameworks that are used include Jackendoff’s Conceptual Structure, Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, Lieber’s lexical semantic approach to word formation, Pustejovsky’s Generative Lexicon, Beard’s Lexeme-Morpheme-Base Morphology and the onomasiological approach to terminology and word formation. An extensive introduction gives a historical overview of the study of the semantics of word formation and lexicalization, explaining how the different theoretical frameworks used in the contributions relate to each other.

This book analyses the sociopragmatics of attitude datives in four Levantine Arabic varieties; these are Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian, and Palestinian Arabic. Attitude datives are optional pronominal pragmatic markers that serve two broad functions: (i) an evaluative function to express a stance toward an issue or an object, and/or (ii) a relational function to manage (e.g., affirm, challenge) relationships between social actors. The study provides ample data from a variety of sources: soap operas, movies, plays, talk shows, social media, and so on. It is supplemented with short videos of most data on a companion website https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/haddad. The study has four goals: to document the phenomenon of attitude datives in Levantine Arabic; to analyze their meaning contribution in interaction; to examine the contextual factors that inform and are informed by their use; to account for the cognitive coordination that social actors engage in when an attitude dative is used.