Table of Contents

1. Explaining Null and Overt Subjects in Spoken Arabic 2. Word Order and Textual Function in Gulf Arabic 3. Information Structure in the Najdi Dialects 4. Word Order in Egyptian Arabic: Form and Function 5. The Information Structure of Existential Sentences in Egyptian Arabic 6. The Pragmatics of Information Structure in Arabic: Colloquial Tautological Expressions as a Paradigm Example 7. From Complementizer to Discourse Marker: The Functions of ’inno in Lebanese Arabic 8. The (Absence of) Prosodic Reflexes of Given/New Information Status in Egyptian Arabic 9. Moroccan Arabic—French Codeswitching and Information Structure 10. Conversation Markers in Arabic—Hausa Codeswitching: Saliency and Language Hierarchies 11. Understatement, Euphemism, and Circumlocution in Egyptian Arabic: Cooperation in Conversational Dissembling

About the Author

University of Bayreuth, Germany University of Maryland, USA

Reviews

"By and large, the studies in this ground-breaking volume have opened a new vista on the significant subject of information structure, and will be of immense value to all students of Arabic and comparative linguistics who are interested in intercultural interaction of pragmatic ideas in modern linguistic scholarship." - Amidu Olalekan Sanni, Lagos; Zeitschrift fuer Arabische Linguistik (Journal of Arabic Linguistics), 57, 2013, pp. 91-94 (2013).