Lexington Books
Pages: 248
Trim: 6¼ x 9⅛
978-1-4985-7455-6 • Hardback • August 2018 • $95.00 • (£65.00)
978-1-4985-7456-3 • eBook • August 2018 • $90.00 • (£60.00)
Abdelkader Fassi Fehri is professor of arts and human sciences at Mohammed V University of Rabat
Introduction: Building Feminine to Mean Gender, Number, Numeral, and Quantifier Extensions in Arabic
Chapter 1: Semantic Diversity of Gender and its Architecture
Chapter 2: New and Multiple Roles: Classification, Individuation, Evaluation, and Typology
Chapter 3: Numeral Roots, Categories, and Gender Variation
Chapter 4: Quantifiers Phrases, their Features, Types, and Partitions
Chapter 5: Number, Individuation, Atoms, and Unities
Conclusion
Centering on gender, individuation, and number, Fassi Fehri's book deals with one of the most basic and less understood aspects of the underlying structure and ontology of natural language, exposing hard to die myths such as the meaninglessness of gender or the limited structural role played by its exponents. Fassi's voice is a deeply original mix of true scholarships and analytical insights, definitely to be paid attention to in the current panorama of formal and typological studies on the topic.
— Maria Rita Manzini, Università di Firenze
In this outstanding contribution, Fassi Fehri demonstrates that the traditional notion of feminine as a lexical marker of noun class is insufficient to capture the surprisingly broad range of uses of gender marking in Arabic and other languages. The study uncovers intricate interactions that connect gender, number and quantification, and permeate many linguistic phenomena. It is benchmark whose influence will be felt for years to come.
— Peter Hallman, Austrian Institute for AI, Vienna
Fassi Fehri’s new book is a brilliant continuation of his groundbreaking research line, contributing to understanding Universal Grammar through peculiarities of Arabic syntax. Taking grammatical features as the driving force behind many syntactic processes, the author tackles the most difficult task of investigating the role of Gender, the feature previously regarded as the least connected to deep syntactic effects. The result is an exciting model of how innovative research can be pursued within an explanatory science of human language.
— Giuseppe Longobardi, University of York
In this major contribution, Fassi Fehri re-thinks in depth the sense of gender and number as categories of nominality. His analysis of Arabic weaves together many neglected phenomena into an innovative approach to countability, individuation, and quantification, where morphosyntactic categories have a much broader range of functions. A robust theoretical framework places the analysis of Arabic in a cross-linguistic perspective, making the study relevant for a wide audience.
— Paolo Acquaviva, University College Dublin
Fassi Fehri demonstrates how grammatical gender in Arabic varieties plays new roles at various levels of nominal and clausal syntax, making an astonishingly wide range of semantic distinctions in terms of individuation, classification, number, quantification, and much more. The findings are remarkable, yet almost incontrovertible, once they are clearly laid out and analysed, as in this book, a veritable treasure trove for anyone interested in the role of gender in the grammar.
— Anders Holmberg, Newcastle University