A Transformational Grammar of Modern Literary Arabic

Most studies on Arabic have dealt exclusively with either regional dialects of the language found in classic texts such as the Holy Quran. In A Transformational Grammar of Modern Literary Arabic, Mohammad Ziad Kebbe provides the most thorough syntactic analysis available of the language used by modern writers and journalists. Drawing on Chomsky's model of linguistic theory, Kebbe provides an in-depth generative account of three major types of Arabic sentences: the coordinate, the negative, and the interrogative. He also focuses on significant transformations frequently found in modern Arabic, such as pronominalization, clitic movement, and dative movement.

A Transformational Grammar of Modern Literary Arabic will appeal to all language specialists and promote further appreciation of the structural subtleties of written Arabic.