In 1997 Naphtali Kinberg died, one of the best specialists in Classical Arabic and the Arabic grammatical tradition. His main work, the index on Farrā’'s Ma‘ānī l-Qur’ān, which appeared in the Brill series Handbook of Oriental Studies (1996) will remain one of the most important reference tools for future research in this field. In this volume the editors have collected a number of articles in which Kinberg demonstrates his ability to combine modern linguistic insights with the theories of the Arab grammarians. The result is a series of detailed studies on such aspects of the structure of Arabic as conditional sentences, adverbial clauses, and the particles lākin and qad. These articles have been published before, sometimes in relatively inaccessible journals. They are now made available in a collective volume, and made accessible by an index that will facilitate using them in research on Arabic linguistics. This volume also contains an important study that was part of Kinberg's legacy, the edition and translation of a treatise on the pronunciation of the ḍād by the grammarian ‘Alī al-Mansūrī (12th/18th century). This treatise is an important document on a hitherto neglected aspect of Arabic phonetic studies. It discusses the phonetic status of the sound that was regarded by the Arabs themselves as the most characteristic sound of their language.

This book presents a comprehensive portrait of the Kitāb Sībawayhi. It offers new insights into its historical and linguistic arguments and underlines their strong correlation. The decisive historical argument highlights al-Ḥīra’s role, not only as the centre of pre-Islamic Arabic culture, but also as the matrix within which early Arab linguistics grew and developed. The Kitāb’s value as a communicative grammar forms the crux of the linguistic argument. The complementarity of syntax and pragmatics is established as a condition sine qua non for Sībawayhi’s analysis of language. The benefits of a complementary approach are reflected in the analysis of nominal sentences and related notions of ibtidā’ and definiteness. The pragmatic principle of identifiability is uncovered as the ultimate determiner of word order.

This book represents a major contribution to the field of Arabic linguistics. It gives in depth treatments of the current issues in Arabic linguistics and makes excellent readings for graduate courses and for linguists at large.

This second volume on The Foundations of Arabic Linguistics contains contributions from the second conference on Arabic linguistics, hosted by the University of Cambridge in 2012. All contributions deal with the grammatical theories formulated by the first grammarian to write a complete survey of the Arabic language, Sībawayhi (died at the end of the 8th century C.E.). They treat such topics as the use of hadith in grammar, the treatment of Persian loanwords, the expression of modality, conditional clauses, verbal valency, and the syntax of numerals. Contributors are: Georgine Ayoub, Michael G. Carter, Hanadi Dayyeh, Jean N. Druel, Manuela E.B. Giolfo, Almog Kasher, Giuliano Lancioni, Amal Marogy, Arik Sadan, Beata Sheyhatovitch, Cristina Solimando, and Kees Versteegh.

Through analysing ancient and classical Arabic literature, including the Qur'an, from within the Arabic literary tradition, this book provides an original interpretation of poetics, and of other important aspects of Arab culture. Ancient Arabic literature is a realm of poetry; prose literary forms emerged rather late, and even then remained in the shadow of poetic creative efforts. Traditionally, this literature has been viewed through a philologist’s lens and has often been represented as ‘materialistic’ in the sense that its poetry lacked imagination. As a result, Arabic poetry was often evaluated negatively in relation to other poetic traditions. The Poetics of Ancient and Classical Arabic Literature argues that old Arabic literature is remarkably coherent in poetical terms and has its own individuality, and that claims of its materialism arise from a failure to grasp the poetic principles of the Arabic tradition. Analysing the Qur’an, which is known for confronting the poetry of the time, this book reveals that "post Qur’anic" literature came to be defined against it. Thus, the constitution and interpretation of Arabic literature imposed itself as a particular exegesis of the sacred Text. Disputing traditional interpretations by arguing that Arabic literature can only be assessed from within, and not through comparison with other literary traditions, this book is of interest to students and scholars of Islamic Studies, Arabic Studies and Literary Studies.

This Liber Amicorum discusses topics on the history of Arabic grammar, Arabic linguistics, and Arabic dialects, domains in which Kees Versteegh plays a leading role.

This volume is a corpus-based study that unveils the morpho-syntax and the semantics of the Arabic verb.

In Tense and Text in Classical Arabic, Michal Marmorstein presents a new discourse-oriented analysis of the indicative tense system in Classical Arabic. Critical of commonly held assumptions regarding the binary structure of the tense system and the perfect-imperfect asymmetry, the author redefines the discussion by analysing the extended syntactic and textual environments in which the paradigm of the indicative forms is used.The study shows that the function of Classical Arabic tenses is determined by the interaction of their inherent grammatical meaning and the overall dialogic, narrative, or generic contexts in which they occur. It also demonstrates the particularizing effect of context, so that temporal and aspectual meanings are always more nuanced, delicate, and pragmatically motivated in actual discourse.