In this article, it is demonstrated that this ban on adjunction to arguments and to semantically active phrases cannot be maintained as a universal requirement of human language, and this by presenting and analyzing a set of facts from Moroccan Arabic where adjunction to clausal arguments is involved without causing ungrammaticality. I show that in this language both argumental NPs and/or a large set of adverbial expressions may be left-adjoined to various types of clausal arguments occupying various types of argument positions. Meanwhile, it is argued that the first type of adjuncts is the result of base-adjunction and that the second type is the result of derived adjunction.

    The phonetic inventories of the two subgroups match the list of Colloquial Egyptian Arabic consonants drawn up by Harrell (1957). The children have exercised a number of phonological processes. Since the percentages of occurrence of these processes were smaller than the minimum 50% limit, they did not appear in the phonetic inventories. The most prominent process is interdentalization or sibilant fronting. Ten children replaced dental fricatives with interdental ones. All these children belong to the first subgroup. Sibilant fronting disappears completely in the second subgroup. The total percentage of incorrect articulations of the first subgroup is higher than that of the second subgroup. The percentages of incorrect articulations are highest in initial position and lowest in final position for both subgroups.

    While various aspects of Arabic phonology and morphology have attracted the attention of researchers in generative linguistics over the past thirty years, the study of Arabic hypocoristics (or nicknames) has remained largely neglected. There is virtually nothing published regarding the description of how hypocoristics are formed in present day Arabic even though the use of hypocoristics is common in the spoken language. In this paper we describe three major patterns of hypocoristics in colloquial Arabic based on the Ammani Jordanian dialect. We show that the hypocoristics are based on the root consonants and that there is a dispreference for guttural consonants in certain positions of the hypocoristic.

    Much of the interest that the study of language obsolescence has held for linguists lies in the opportunity to compare the deviant language production of imperfect final speakers with the language production of fully proficient speakers whose usage can stand as a full-fluency norm.* The assumption is that late-stage speakers in settings where language shift is well advanced will, like children and aphasics, demonstrate less than full control of the target language, and that careful study of the shortfall in their language production will highlight structural features that may be typical of later acquisition stages and/or are particularly susceptible to reduction and loss. It is understandable, then, that obsolescence studies have from the first focused on the effects of language contact and have included a strong emphasis on processes of contraction, reduction, simplification, and loss.

    This paper aims to shed some light on the outcome of the learning of EFL under conditions of non-use. To that effect two issues have been addressed: (i) what are the linguistic characteristics of the retained language? and (ii) how do language losers compensate for the lost language? To answer these questions, I proceeded cross-sectionally. A sample of forty written productions of secondary school graduates was compared to that of twenty in-school pupils in their final year of secondary studies. Investigation of the data came out with the following results: (i) the respondents writings from both groups were characterized by syntactic, lexical and morphological simplification (ii) this simplification, however, increased significantly after graduation. It moved in the directions of L1s. but did not progress in a linear fashion, and finally (iii) lexical production, especially the noun class was the most affected by language attrition. These findings, though limited as they are, are suggestive and have theoretical and pedagogical implications for the teaching of EFL in general, and in Morocco in particular.

    This article discusses the semantico-syntactic structure and properties of coreferential and anaphoric pronouns in Standard Arabic within the generative framework. It reveals the existing overlap between these two types of pronoun by eliciting the similarities and differences between them.