A Syntax of Modern Literary Arabic: A Comparative and Historical Approach

FAIN: FA-10778-74

Ariel A. Bloch
University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA 94704-5940)

To make a syntactic study of Modern Literary Arabic from an historical point of view in order to maintain a sense of the language's past forms and mutations. Any natural language is a living organism which carries into the present much of its linguistic past. Arabic is particularly conservative, preserving in its grammar quite a few archaic features. A rigidly static, synchronic approach to language, such as has been followed, almost without exception, in this country during the last decade, does not do justice to the phenomena.