Jonathan Owens
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3638348 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Jonathan Owens |
| PRENOMES | Jonathan |
| SOBRENOME | Owens |
| ASSINATURA | OWENS J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Bayreuth |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9807-4889 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 49 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 33 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 48 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1980 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2023 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
Suffix Diversity and Arabic Language Phonological Typology
The complexities of Arabic phonology have been documented in detail in particular in the dialectological and theoretical phonological traditions. In this paper we argue for the incorporation of a third perspective into Arabic linguistics, an Arabic-internal typological perspective. Eleven geographically representative dialects are compared along a common parameter, the structure of simple CaCaC nouns and verbs, followed by the addition of first o…
The Historical Linguistics of the Intrusive *-n in Arabic and West Semitic
A much discussed morpheme in Semitic historical linguistics is the suffix *-n. Its reflexes include the energic in Classical Arabic, the ventive in Akkadian, and many languages with a [V - n - object pronoun] reflex. Explanations of its origins fall broadly into two camps. One sees it originally as a proto-Semitic verbal suffix, while the other derives it from a grammaticalization of an originally independent [deictic/presentative + object pronou…
Contemporaneous Comparative Corpora and Historical Linguistic Reconstruction
A comparison of two large oral corpora, one Nigerian Arabic, one Egyptian, show a massive expansion, both quantitative and structural-functional, of the demonstrative in Nigerian Arabic. Contact with other languages of the Lake Chad area, into which Arabic speakers began to move about 1215 ce, explains the innovations in the use of the Nigerian Arabic demonstrative. Straightforward comparison of corpora offers lucid insights into basic historical…
Equilibrio, puntuación, difusión diaplanar
Pocos negarían el hecho de que los árabes y los arameos comparten una larga historia común. Tampoco resulta polémico decir que ha habido una influencia basada en el contacto entre ambas lenguas. Sin embargo, lo que no ha sido reconocido hasta hoy día es la profundidad y dimensión de dicha influencia. En este trabajo presento 24 argumentos estructurales y de detalle tomados del terreno de la fonología, morfofonología, morfología y sintaxis para mo…
Semantic mapping
Idioms have generally played a supporting rather than a leading role in research on figurative language. In Cognitive Linguistics for instance idioms have been understood against how they are embedded in conceptual metaphors (Lakoff 1987,Women, fire, and dangerous things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Clausner and Croft 1997, Productivity and schematicity in metaphors.Cognitive Science21. 247-282) while in the experimental psycholinguisti…
The lexical nature of idioms
Beyond categorical typology
The morphologization of an Arabic creole
East African Nubi has classic attributes of a creole — it was formed in a short period of time and its structure diverges dramatically from its lexical source, Egyptian and Sudanic Arabic — yet it differs from most creoles as well in that it has a fairly robust morphology (Owens 2001). One could call it a morphologically rich creole, even if its morphology is much simpler than that of Arabic. Understanding why this happened in Nubi presupposes ha…
Many heads are better than one
Accounts of semantic change have tended to emphasize universal, language internal explanations embedded within comparative typological frameworks. This paper describes in detail one lexeme and its many idiomatic collocations in one Arabic dialect, showing that the idiomaticity of Nigerian Arabic raas ‘head’ has been fundamentally determined by Kanuri, the dominant language of the Lake Chad region, with which Arabic has been in contact for 600 yea…
Arabic As a Minority Language
Subject expression and discourse embeddedness in Emirati Arabic
Since Prince (1981) and Givón (1983), studies on discourse reference have explained the grammatical realization of referents in terms of general concepts such as “assumed familiarity” or “discourse coherence.” In this paper, we develop a complementary approach based on a detailed statistical tracking of subjects in Emirati Arabic, from which two major categories of subject expression emerge. On the one hand, null subjects are opposed to overt one…
Debates
The notion of ‘language’ is a surprisingly fuzzy concept even among the community of linguistic scholars. This is despite the fact that concepts and methodologies exist to give fairly explicit characterizations of the notion. In the context of a general review of a book on Maltese Linguistics, this article will address definitional issues arising out of the interesting historical and socio-political reality of present-day Maltese, particularly as…
What is a Language
Founded in 1683 in Leiden, the Netherlands, Brill is a leading international academic publisher in the Humanities, Social Sciences, International Law, and Biology. With offices in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the USA and Asia, Brill today publishes more than 360 journals and 2,000 new books and reference works each year as well as a large number of databases and primary source research collections
Subject-verb order in spoken Arabic
This article explores the relationship between the global functions of variable subject-verb order and morpholexical class of subjects in the spoken Arabic of the Arabian peninsula. Using corpus-based methods, it is shown that lexical class—pronoun, pronominal, noun—definiteness, and the discourse-defined lexical specificity of a noun all correlate significantly with subject-verb or verb-subject word order. The global function of the two orders i…
Stability in Subject-Verb Word Order
This article differs from traditional treatments of subject-verb word order in Semitic in two respects. First, we take as our point of departure a detailed study of word order in contemporary Arabian Peninsular Arabic, which shows that the respective order of the subject and verb in that variety is determined by morpholexical and by discourse-immanent factors. From this starting point, we work backwards, applying the same analytical framework to …
Die dunklen Anfänge
La formation des mots dans les langues sémitiques
Pre-diaspora Arabic
Arabic dialects, the native spoken Arabic of about 250 million people, are spread over an immense, contiguous geographical area from Iran to Lake Chad, from Morocco to Yemen. Corresponding to this geographical spread is considerable linguistic diversity. An explanation for this diversity has proved elusive. The existence of variants found either in the modern dialects or in the Classical literature (or both), which are not self-evidently derivabl…
Hierarchicalized matrices
One of the most developed models for explaining bilingual constituents is the matrix language frame model (Myers-Scotton 1997). Its basic insight is that a bilingual constituent will be determined by the abstract structure underlying only one of the languages of the constituent, the matrix language. While the model has been tested against many language situations, a situation typical for minority linguistic groups in Maiduguri in NE Nigeria has n…
Arabic Dialect History and Historical Linguistic Mythology
Studies of spoken Arabic have been dominated by descriptions of individual dialects, dialect atlases and corpus-based sociolinguistic studies. There have been few attempts to apply principles of historical linguistics systematically to this relatively rich data base. 1 Earlier studies such as Cowan (1960) or Kaye (1972) stand out as the exception.2 Since these two studies appeared a great deal of progress has been made in Arabic dialectology (e.g…
Processing the world piece by piece
Nigerian Arabic has two structures for coding N + N relations: one in which the properties of the possessed noun are severely constrained and one in which the possessed and possessor nouns allow a full complement of modifiers. Similar to the methodology of Poplack and her collaborators (e.g., Sankoff, Poplack, & Vanniarajan, 1990), a normative distribution of nouns in the two possessive structures is established based on a corpus of monolingual (…
Arabic Sociolinguistics
On club membership
La linguistique moderne est-elle applicable à la compréhension de la théorie grammaticale arabe médiévale ? Cette question a reçu différentes réponses au cours des vingt-cinq dernières années : Carter (1972, 1994), par exemple, rejette toute pertinence à une telle approche car l'enracinement sociohistorique de la grammaire arabe exclut la comparaison avec les idées modernes. Owens, d'autre part, (1995) soutient que les observateurs modernes devra…
Uniformity and discontinuity
A speech community in the Labovian tradition is characterized by a relatively uniform distribution of linguistic variants across social entities, and an evaluative consensus pertaining to the status of such forms. Explicit debate on the opposite situation, in which variation is marked by sharp contrasts between social groups, which are termed discontinuities, has tended to center on specific social constructs (e.g. social networks), or on specifi…
Representativeness in the data base
Subject expression and discourse embeddedness in Emirati Arabic
Since Prince (1981) and Givón (1983), studies on discourse reference have explained the grammatical realization of referents in terms of general concepts such as “assumed familiarity” or “discourse coherence.” In this paper, we develop a complementary approach based on a detailed statistical tracking of subjects in Emirati Arabic, from which two major categories of subject expression emerge. On the one hand, null subjects are opposed to overt one…
Arabic Dialect History and Historical Linguistic Mythology
Studies of spoken Arabic have been dominated by descriptions of individual dialects, dialect atlases and corpus-based sociolinguistic studies. There have been few attempts to apply principles of historical linguistics systematically to this relatively rich data base. 1 Earlier studies such as Cowan (1960) or Kaye (1972) stand out as the exception.2 Since these two studies appeared a great deal of progress has been made in Arabic dialectology (e.g…
Many heads are better than one
Accounts of semantic change have tended to emphasize universal, language internal explanations embedded within comparative typological frameworks. This paper describes in detail one lexeme and its many idiomatic collocations in one Arabic dialect, showing that the idiomaticity of Nigerian Arabic raas ‘head’ has been fundamentally determined by Kanuri, the dominant language of the Lake Chad region, with which Arabic has been in contact for 600 yea…
Subject-verb order in spoken Arabic
This article explores the relationship between the global functions of variable subject-verb order and morpholexical class of subjects in the spoken Arabic of the Arabian peninsula. Using corpus-based methods, it is shown that lexical class—pronoun, pronominal, noun—definiteness, and the discourse-defined lexical specificity of a noun all correlate significantly with subject-verb or verb-subject word order. The global function of the two orders i…
Case and proto-Arabic, Part I
It is a fundamental point of comparative and historical linguistics that genealogical affiliation can only be established on the basis of concrete linguistic features, the more central the feature the more important for classificatory purposes. While there is no absolute consensus about how a central linguistic feature be identified, it can be taken as axiomatic that long-term reconstruction and classification rests most fundamentally on phonolog…
Structure, class and dependency
The Syllable as Prosody
One unit of Firthian prosodic analysis is the anaptyctic vowel: 'such common phenomena as elision, liaison, anaptyxis, the use of so-called cushion consonants or "sounds for euphony" are involved in this study of prosodies. These devices of explanation begin to make sense when prosodic structure is approached as a system of syntagmatic relation' (Firth, 1948, 57 f
Semantic mapping
Idioms have generally played a supporting rather than a leading role in research on figurative language. In Cognitive Linguistics for instance idioms have been understood against how they are embedded in conceptual metaphors (Lakoff 1987,Women, fire, and dangerous things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Clausner and Croft 1997, Productivity and schematicity in metaphors.Cognitive Science21. 247-282) while in the experimental psycholinguisti…
The lexical nature of idioms
Processing the world piece by piece
Nigerian Arabic has two structures for coding N + N relations: one in which the properties of the possessed noun are severely constrained and one in which the possessed and possessor nouns allow a full complement of modifiers. Similar to the methodology of Poplack and her collaborators (e.g., Sankoff, Poplack, & Vanniarajan, 1990), a normative distribution of nouns in the two possessive structures is established based on a corpus of monolingual (…
Uniformity and discontinuity
A speech community in the Labovian tradition is characterized by a relatively uniform distribution of linguistic variants across social entities, and an evaluative consensus pertaining to the status of such forms. Explicit debate on the opposite situation, in which variation is marked by sharp contrasts between social groups, which are termed discontinuities, has tended to center on specific social constructs (e.g. social networks), or on specifi…
Case and proto-Arabic, Part II
In Part I of this paper, the status of case in proto-Arabic was examined in the light of comparative Afroasiatic, comparative Semitic and the treatment of case among the earliest Arabic grammarians. The thesis was developed that a caseless variety of Arabic is prior to a case-based one. It was argued that there is comparatively little support for deriving a proto-Arabic case system from a pan-phylic or even a pan-family case system. Furthermore, …
Minority languages and urban norms
La sociolinguistique urbaine a eu tendance a se focaliser sur l'identification des elements de variation basee sur des groupes significativement differents. L'A. examine la variation linguistique urbaine a partir de l'analyse d'un cas particulier: l'arabe parle a Maiduguri, Nigeria. Il relie la variation au contexte socio-politico-demographique dans lequel vivent les locuteurs de cette langue. Il aborde notamment la question de savoir dans quelle…
Models for Interpreting the Development of Medieval Arabic Grammatical Theory
The most fundamental concept in the conceptualization of early Arabic grammatical theory (c. 175-320 A.H./ A.D. 920-790) is that of the Basran and Kufan linguistic schools, constructs which go back at least to the 4th/ 10th century. Weil (1913) and more recently Carter (1973) have called into question the historical validity of the schools, and even studies sympathetic to a more literal historical interpretation of them (Baalbaki 1981) fail to fi…
The Foundations of Grammar
Early Arabic Grammatical Theory
The Arabic grammatical tradition is remarkable for having organized a large amount of descriptive material within a sophisticated formal framework. The present study seeks to elucidate the early development of this system from a theory-internal perspective; it is mainly concerned with the development of the syntactic theory as a formal object, as system of rules. This endeavor is constituted of four sub-goals: a description of early developments,…
Defending the county — A political explanation of the failure to reorganize local government in England and Wales
The Foundations of Grammar
On getting a head
The evaluation of features in a systematic dependency grammar
The Syllable as Prosody
One unit of Firthian prosodic analysis is the anaptyctic vowel: 'such common phenomena as elision, liaison, anaptyxis, the use of so-called cushion consonants or "sounds for euphony" are involved in this study of prosodies. These devices of explanation begin to make sense when prosodic structure is approached as a system of syntagmatic relation' (Firth, 1948, 57 f
The evaluation of features in a systematic dependency grammar
A note on constraining syntactic features
On getting a head
Structure, class and dependency
A Grammar of Harar Oromo
The lexical basis of variation in Jordanian Arabic
Nominal relations in systemic dependency grammar
Traditionally dependency grammar recognizes heads and dependents as primitive elements [Tesniere 1959, Robinson 1970, Hudson 1984]. I have suggested [Owens 1984b, 1985a] that these notions are dispensable ones and in this paper support this point with data from nominal relations (NP relations) in Oromo. In the first part of this paper, I describe the basic theoretical model, and in the second I consider two phenomena that have often been assumed …
The Syntactic Basis of Arabic Word Classification
A MONG the most famous tenets of Arabic grammar is the division I of words into verbs, nouns and particles. What is perhaps given less attention is the fact that the Arabic grammarians defined each of these according to criteria from all levels of linguistic analysisphonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic/pragmatic. Of these perhaps the two most important are the morphological and syntactic. In this paper I will show the importance of…
Defending the county — A political explanation of the failure to reorganize local government in England and Wales
The Foundations of Grammar
East African Nubi
A central question in Creole studies has been to ascertain to what degree the structure of creole languages is determined by universal processes, as opposed to inheritance from super/substratal sources. The universalist position has been most strongly advocated by Derek Bickerton, who sees a subclass of creole languages, early-creolizing creoles, as being determined by a universal bioprogram. His evidence has been based entirely on creoles with a…
The Foundations of Grammar
Early Arabic Grammatical Theory
The Arabic grammatical tradition is remarkable for having organized a large amount of descriptive material within a sophisticated formal framework. The present study seeks to elucidate the early development of this system from a theory-internal perspective; it is mainly concerned with the development of the syntactic theory as a formal object, as system of rules. This endeavor is constituted of four sub-goals: a description of early developments,…
Models for Interpreting the Development of Medieval Arabic Grammatical Theory
The most fundamental concept in the conceptualization of early Arabic grammatical theory (c. 175-320 A.H./ A.D. 920-790) is that of the Basran and Kufan linguistic schools, constructs which go back at least to the 4th/ 10th century. Weil (1913) and more recently Carter (1973) have called into question the historical validity of the schools, and even studies sympathetic to a more literal historical interpretation of them (Baalbaki 1981) fail to fi…
The Foundations of Grammar
Language in the graphics mode
Minority languages and urban norms
La sociolinguistique urbaine a eu tendance a se focaliser sur l'identification des elements de variation basee sur des groupes significativement differents. L'A. examine la variation linguistique urbaine a partir de l'analyse d'un cas particulier: l'arabe parle a Maiduguri, Nigeria. Il relie la variation au contexte socio-politico-demographique dans lequel vivent les locuteurs de cette langue. Il aborde notamment la question de savoir dans quelle…
The comparative study of medieval Arabic grammatical theory
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Idiomatic Structure and the Theory of Genetic Relationship
It has been an assumption of many practitioners of comparative linguistics that genetic relations are defined between languages as holistic entities. A recent explicit expression of this position is Thomason &Kaufman (1988). An alternative viewpoint, probably a minority position, is that expressed (inter alia) by Allen (1953), which defines genetic relations in terms of linguistic components. Assuming the correctness of the first position, which …
Arabs and Arabic in the Lake Chad Region
Representativeness in the data base
Arabs and Arabic in the Lake Chad Region
Case and proto-Arabic, Part II
In Part I of this paper, the status of case in proto-Arabic was examined in the light of comparative Afroasiatic, comparative Semitic and the treatment of case among the earliest Arabic grammarians. The thesis was developed that a caseless variety of Arabic is prior to a case-based one. It was argued that there is comparatively little support for deriving a proto-Arabic case system from a pan-phylic or even a pan-family case system. Furthermore, …
Case and proto-Arabic, Part I
It is a fundamental point of comparative and historical linguistics that genealogical affiliation can only be established on the basis of concrete linguistic features, the more central the feature the more important for classificatory purposes. While there is no absolute consensus about how a central linguistic feature be identified, it can be taken as axiomatic that long-term reconstruction and classification rests most fundamentally on phonolog…
Philosophy (47 obras) · Linguistics (44 obras) · Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis (28 obras) · Arabic (26 obras) · History (25 obras) · Computer Science (21 obras) · Philosophy (19 obras) · Historical and Linguistic Studies (15 obras) · Sociology (13 obras) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (11 obras)