The majority of the available studies which have been done on word order in Arabic are derived from improvised and restricted data taken from the classical variety of Arabic. ALL these studies are generatively-oriented, and consequently their main concern was to find out which word order is the basic one and which orders derive from it. In brief, all these studies are basically structural and have very little, if anything, to do with the situations in which the language was used or with the factors that motivated it's use. We think that such treatments are inadequate, because: (1) the modern standard variety has been totally neglected, and (2) the basic functions of Language as a tool of human communication is not accounted for by these studies. To make up for these inadequacies we are going to approach the issue of word order from a functional vantage point which seeks to relate the structure and it's function. Secondly, we will choose 'Modern Standard Arabic' to be our field of inquiry. Thirdly, all the examples which we are going to discuss will be taken from concrete linguistic situations. We intend to test the following hypotheses: 1. The traditional dichotomy of word order in marked/unmarked terms at the sentence level is unsatisfactory. 2. It is useful to differentiate between basicness and unmarkedness of word order. 3. The frequency with which each word order type occurs may depend on the type of text, and the attitude of the writer towards his/her addressees. 4. A switch from a certain word order-type to another within the same text can sometimes be determined by a shift in the text-typologicalfocus. 5. Permutations of sentence constituents in Arabic sometimes change the grammatical status of the constituents permuted and sometimes do not. 6. The Principle of Functional Sentence Perspective has great influence in Arabic Language, 7. Passivization as a syntactic device influences the order of words in Arabic. 8. Reasons for having different word orders in Arabic can be elucidated by appealing to other cornrnunicative considerations. 9. Different word orders in Arabic serve semantic, syntactic and pragmatic functions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:523989 |
| Date | January 1989 |
| Creators | Osman, Mirghani El-Sayed |
| Publisher | University of Salford |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://usir.salford.ac.uk/2186/ |
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