(Modern Written Arabic (First edition

The book is aimed at four kinds of reader. The first is the student of Arabic at a
relatively advanced level who is looking for a conveniently classified repertoire
of forms and constructions. It is not a pedagogical work in itself, but a
supplement to a teaching grammar or language course: it can profitably be
consulted, for example, for details of the actual use of subordinating conjunctions
or the different patterns of negation, extending the token (and usually made-up)
specimens in the textbooks.
The second type of reader is the specialist in Arabic linguistics who needs
data on which to base theories about Arabic, or to support or refute existing
theories, such as the different interpretations of the copula, conditional syntax,
etc. Here a good knowledge of both Arabic and linguistics is presupposed.
Another category of Arabist reader is the historian of the language, who will
find in this work a relatively narrow tranche of material reflecting the current
state of the language in some detail. To give this aspect of the book more depth,
there are cross-references to Cantarino' s Syntax of Modern Arabic Prose (but see
Finally, the work is designed to be accessible to general linguists with no
knowledge of Arabic. For them, this book will provide the kind of information
which would be relevant to comparative studies, e.g. questions of word order,
agreement, predication, tense and aspect, and so on.