Publications

Publication details [#38878]

Justice, David. 1987. The Semantics of Form in Arabic: In the mirror of European languages. John Benjamins. IV+417 pp.
Publication type
Book – monograph
Publication language
English
Language as a subject

Annotation

Justice's first aim in this volume is to demystify the Arabic language, which is widely perceived as difficult to learn, and has been characterised as ambiguous and confusingly polysemous. The central concern of this three-dimensional portrait of Classical Arabic is a version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language is a determinant of other aspects of culture. But rvoather than focusing on the possible influences of language on thought, Justice is intersted in connections between language and language use or langue and parole. Among the topics treated are: the difficulty of Arabic; morphosyntax and Whorfian semantics; the role of duality in Arabic; iconicity; a population profile of vocabulary; the syntactic cut' of Arabic; and the relation between causatives and verbs that ascribe qualities to an object.