Four Essays on Semitic Grammar and Dialectology

In this bilingual volume, Hans Lagerqvist presents to the reader four linguistic essays previously discussed at the Semitic seminar at Uppsala University. (1) The essay Definite and Indefinite Relative Clauses in Literary Modern Standard Arabic: An Outline of a Structural Analysis is a study of the so called definite relative clauses, which leads the author to consider their pronouns as split morphemes. (2) Contribution à l'étude de l'inaccompli en b(i)- is an essay that tries to explain the origin of the verbal prefix b(i)- and in which four Mashreq dialects are analysed: those of Egypt, the Saoudi Arabian Najd, Syria and the Persian Gulf countries. (3) La Proposition nominale: une structure en quête de clarté, takes up to discussion a phenomenon that has been much debated amongst linguists, Semitists and Slavists, viz. the nominal or verbless sentence. The nominal sentence is primarily analysed as it appears in Biblical Hebrew and Quranic Arabic (4) A Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Study of the Triglossia in the Novel Ya Maryam by Sinan An-un is a story that takes place in Baghdad and presents a number of characters who express themselves in Christian Baghdadi or Muslim Baghdadi.