Scholars@Duke
Abbas Benmamoun

Abbas Benmamoun

Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement
Duke University
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Selected Publications

Heritage Language Research and Theoretical Linguistics

Chapter · January 1, 2021 Our understanding of the syntax of natural language and syntactic aspects that obtain across languages and other aspects that display variation has greatly benefited from research on a large number of languages representing a diversity of language families ... Full text Cite

Is learning a standard variety similar to learning a new language?: Evidence from heritage speakers of Arabic

Journal Article Studies in Second Language Acquisition · March 1, 2018 This study examines heritage speakers' knowledge of Standard Arabic (SA) and compares their patterns of SA acquisition to those of learners of SA as second/foreign language (L2). In addition, the study examines the influence of previously acquired language ... Full text Cite

Introduction

Book · January 1, 2017 The poet Hafez Ibrahim has a memorable line in his famous poem on the Arabic language. In that line, Arabic boasts that it is a sea whose depths contain treasures and then wonders whether the diver has been asked about them. For modern linguists, that line ... Full text Cite

Factors affecting the retention of sentential negation in heritage Egyptian Arabic

Journal Article Bilingualism · July 28, 2015 This study investigates the areas of resilience and vulnerability in sentential negation in heritage Egyptian Arabic and explores their theoretical implications. Egyptian heritage speakers completed three narrative production tasks, five experimental produ ... Full text Cite

Concatenative and nonconcatenative plural formation in L1, L2, and heritage speakers of Arabic

Journal Article Modern Language Journal · September 1, 2014 This study compares Arabic L1, L2, and heritage speakers' (HS) knowledge of plural formation, which involves concatenative and nonconcatenative modes of derivation. Ninety participants (divided equally among L1, L2, and heritage speakers) completed two ora ... Full text Cite

Arabic plurals and root and pattern morphology in Palestinian and Egyptian heritage speakers

Journal Article Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism · January 1, 2014 This study investigates heritage speakers' knowledge of plural formation in their colloquial varieties of Arabic, which use both concatenative and non-concatentative modes of derivation. In the concatenative derivation, a plural suffix attaches to the sing ... Full text Cite

Aspects of second-language transfer in the oral production of Egyptian and Palestinian heritage speakers

Journal Article International Journal of Bilingualism · January 1, 2014 The nature and extent of the impact of language transfer in majority-minority language contexts have been widely debated in both second- and heritage-language acquisition. This study examines four linguistic areas in three oral narratives collected from Eg ... Full text Cite

Heritage languages and their speakers: Opportunities and challenges for linguistics

Journal Article Theoretical Linguistics · November 20, 2013 In this paper, we bring to the attention of the linguistic community recent research on heritage languages. Shifting linguistic attention from the model of a monolingual speaker to the model of a multilingual speaker is important for the advancement of our ... Full text Cite

Gender and number agreement in the oral production of Arabic Heritage speakers

Journal Article Bilingualism · January 1, 2013 Heritage language acquisition has been characterized by various asymmetries, including the differential acquisition rates of various linguistic areas and the unbalanced acquisition of different categories within a single area. This paper examines Arabic he ... Full text Cite

The Location of Sentential Negation in Arabic Varieties

Journal Article Brill's Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics · January 1, 2013 This paper revisits the issue of the representation of sentential negation in Arabic varieties with particular reference to Standard Arabic and four colloquial varieties, Egyptian Arabic, Gulf/Kuwaiti Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, and Jordanian Arabic/Levantine ... Full text Cite

Using magnetic resonance to image the pharynx during Arabic speech: Static and dynamic aspects

Conference 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association 2012, INTERSPEECH 2012 · December 1, 2012 Magnetic resonance imaging has been applied only recently to the study of Arabic speech production. Arabic has a relatively large number of sounds produced with constrictions in the pharynx, a part of the vocal anatomy well-suited to investigation using MR ... Cite

On the definition of theword "Segmental"

Conference Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Speech Prosody, SP 2012 · January 1, 2012 Textbooks in phonology often specify a distinction between segmental features (e.g., place and manner of articulation) vs. suprasegmental features (stress and phrasing). The distinction between segmental and suprasegmental features is useful even in autose ... Cite

Grammatical features of Egyptian and Palestinian Arabic heritage speakers' oral production

Journal Article Studies in Second Language Acquisition · June 1, 2011 This study presents an investigation of oral narratives collected from heritage Egyptian and Palestinian Arabic speakers living in the United States. The focus is on a number of syntactic and morphological features in their production, such as word order, ... Full text Cite

The syntax of Arabic

Book · January 1, 2009 Recent research on the syntax of Arabic has produced valuable literature on the major syntactic phenomena found in the language. This guide to Arabic syntax provides an overview of the major syntactic constructions in Arabic that have featured in recent li ... Full text Cite

Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XIX Papers from the Nineteenth Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, Urbana, Illinois, April 2005

Book · 2007 Printbegrænsninger: Der kan printes 10 sider ad gangen og max. 40 sider pr. session ... Cite

Licensing configurations: The puzzle of head negative polarity items

Journal Article Linguistic Inquiry · December 1, 2006 Full text Cite

Featureless expressions: When morphophonological markers are absent

Journal Article Linguistic Inquiry · December 1, 2006 Ackema and Neeleman (2003) discuss three phenomena that arise in the context of agreement and pronominals: agreement asymmetries, cliticization, and null subjects. They develop a unified analysis for these phenomena, claiming that they all involve a proces ... Full text Cite

Heritage Language Research and Theoretical Linguistics

Chapter · January 1, 2021 Our understanding of the syntax of natural language and syntactic aspects that obtain across languages and other aspects that display variation has greatly benefited from research on a large number of languages representing a diversity of language families ... Full text Cite

Is learning a standard variety similar to learning a new language?: Evidence from heritage speakers of Arabic

Journal Article Studies in Second Language Acquisition · March 1, 2018 This study examines heritage speakers' knowledge of Standard Arabic (SA) and compares their patterns of SA acquisition to those of learners of SA as second/foreign language (L2). In addition, the study examines the influence of previously acquired language ... Full text Cite

Introduction

Book · January 1, 2017 The poet Hafez Ibrahim has a memorable line in his famous poem on the Arabic language. In that line, Arabic boasts that it is a sea whose depths contain treasures and then wonders whether the diver has been asked about them. For modern linguists, that line ... Full text Cite

Factors affecting the retention of sentential negation in heritage Egyptian Arabic

Journal Article Bilingualism · July 28, 2015 This study investigates the areas of resilience and vulnerability in sentential negation in heritage Egyptian Arabic and explores their theoretical implications. Egyptian heritage speakers completed three narrative production tasks, five experimental produ ... Full text Cite

Concatenative and nonconcatenative plural formation in L1, L2, and heritage speakers of Arabic

Journal Article Modern Language Journal · September 1, 2014 This study compares Arabic L1, L2, and heritage speakers' (HS) knowledge of plural formation, which involves concatenative and nonconcatenative modes of derivation. Ninety participants (divided equally among L1, L2, and heritage speakers) completed two ora ... Full text Cite

Arabic plurals and root and pattern morphology in Palestinian and Egyptian heritage speakers

Journal Article Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism · January 1, 2014 This study investigates heritage speakers' knowledge of plural formation in their colloquial varieties of Arabic, which use both concatenative and non-concatentative modes of derivation. In the concatenative derivation, a plural suffix attaches to the sing ... Full text Cite

Aspects of second-language transfer in the oral production of Egyptian and Palestinian heritage speakers

Journal Article International Journal of Bilingualism · January 1, 2014 The nature and extent of the impact of language transfer in majority-minority language contexts have been widely debated in both second- and heritage-language acquisition. This study examines four linguistic areas in three oral narratives collected from Eg ... Full text Cite

Heritage languages and their speakers: Opportunities and challenges for linguistics

Journal Article Theoretical Linguistics · November 20, 2013 In this paper, we bring to the attention of the linguistic community recent research on heritage languages. Shifting linguistic attention from the model of a monolingual speaker to the model of a multilingual speaker is important for the advancement of our ... Full text Cite

Gender and number agreement in the oral production of Arabic Heritage speakers

Journal Article Bilingualism · January 1, 2013 Heritage language acquisition has been characterized by various asymmetries, including the differential acquisition rates of various linguistic areas and the unbalanced acquisition of different categories within a single area. This paper examines Arabic he ... Full text Cite

The Location of Sentential Negation in Arabic Varieties

Journal Article Brill's Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics · January 1, 2013 This paper revisits the issue of the representation of sentential negation in Arabic varieties with particular reference to Standard Arabic and four colloquial varieties, Egyptian Arabic, Gulf/Kuwaiti Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, and Jordanian Arabic/Levantine ... Full text Cite

Using magnetic resonance to image the pharynx during Arabic speech: Static and dynamic aspects

Conference 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association 2012, INTERSPEECH 2012 · December 1, 2012 Magnetic resonance imaging has been applied only recently to the study of Arabic speech production. Arabic has a relatively large number of sounds produced with constrictions in the pharynx, a part of the vocal anatomy well-suited to investigation using MR ... Cite

On the definition of theword "Segmental"

Conference Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Speech Prosody, SP 2012 · January 1, 2012 Textbooks in phonology often specify a distinction between segmental features (e.g., place and manner of articulation) vs. suprasegmental features (stress and phrasing). The distinction between segmental and suprasegmental features is useful even in autose ... Cite

Grammatical features of Egyptian and Palestinian Arabic heritage speakers' oral production

Journal Article Studies in Second Language Acquisition · June 1, 2011 This study presents an investigation of oral narratives collected from heritage Egyptian and Palestinian Arabic speakers living in the United States. The focus is on a number of syntactic and morphological features in their production, such as word order, ... Full text Cite

The syntax of Arabic

Book · January 1, 2009 Recent research on the syntax of Arabic has produced valuable literature on the major syntactic phenomena found in the language. This guide to Arabic syntax provides an overview of the major syntactic constructions in Arabic that have featured in recent li ... Full text Cite

Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XIX Papers from the Nineteenth Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, Urbana, Illinois, April 2005

Book · 2007 Printbegrænsninger: Der kan printes 10 sider ad gangen og max. 40 sider pr. session ... Cite

Licensing configurations: The puzzle of head negative polarity items

Journal Article Linguistic Inquiry · December 1, 2006 Full text Cite

Featureless expressions: When morphophonological markers are absent

Journal Article Linguistic Inquiry · December 1, 2006 Ackema and Neeleman (2003) discuss three phenomena that arise in the context of agreement and pronominals: agreement asymmetries, cliticization, and null subjects. They develop a unified analysis for these phenomena, claiming that they all involve a proces ... Full text Cite

Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XVII-XVIII Papers from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Annual Symposia on Arabic Linguistics

Book · January 1, 2005 The papers in this volume are a selection from papers presented at the Annual Symposia on Arabic Linguistics, held in 2003 (Alexandria) and 2004 (Oklahoma). ... Cite

Agreement parallelism between sentences and noun phrases: A historical sketch

Journal Article Lingua · August 1, 2003 This paper deals with a parallelism between sentences and noun phrases in Classical Arabic. The parallelism in question concerns the distribution of the number feature on the verb in the verb subject (VS) sequence and the (in-)definiteness feature on nouns ... Full text Cite

Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics Papers from the ... Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics

Book · 2002 Causative constructions in English. 1998. 167. BENMAMOUN, Elabbas, Mushira EID and Niloofar HAERI (eds): Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics Vol. XI. Papers from the Eleventh Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, Atlanta, 1997. 1998. 168. RATCLIFFE, Ro ... Cite

Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XIII-XIV Papers from the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Annual Symposia on Arabic Linguistics

Book · 2002 The papers in this collection derive from the Annual Symposia on Arabic Linguistics held in Stanford (1999) and Berkeley (2000). ... Cite

The Feature Structure of Functional Categories A Comparative Study of Arabic Dialects

Book · February 24, 2000 The book brings new insights to issues related to the syntax of functional categories, the relation between syntax and the morpho-phonological component, and comparative syntax. ... Cite

Agreement asymmetries and the PF interface

Conference RESEARCH IN AFROASIATIC GRAMMAR · January 1, 2000 Link to item Cite

Fragments Studies in Ellipsis and Gapping

Book · January 28, 1999 This volume contains essays on ellipsis -- the omission of understood words from a sentence -- and the closely related phenomena of gapping. ... Cite

Arabic morphology: The central role of the imperfective

Journal Article Lingua · January 1, 1999 This article explores the nature and role of the imperfective verb in Arabic. It argues that the imperfective verb is not specified for tense. It is only the default form that is resorted to whenever the verb does not carry temporal features. Syntactically ... Full text Cite

Further remarks on first conjunct agreement

Journal Article Linguistic Inquiry · January 1, 1999 Aoun, Benmamoun, and Sportiche (ABS, 1994) propose an analysis of first conjunct agreement in VS sentences in Lebanese Arabic and Moroccan Arabic. On the basis of the distribution of number-sensitive items, they argue that this type of agreement is due to ... Full text Cite

Remarks and replies: The syntax of quantifiers and quantifier float

Journal Article Linguistic Inquiry · January 1, 1999 The Arabic quantifier kull displays a Q_NP and NP_Q alternation. Shlonsky (1991) argues that in both patterns Q heads a QP projection with the NP as a complement that may undergo movement to [Spec, QP] or beyond to yield the NP_Q pattern and Q-float struct ... Full text Cite

Minimality, reconstruction, and PF movement

Journal Article Linguistic Inquiry · January 1, 1998 We investigate the interaction of clitic left-dislocation (CLLD), wh-interrogatives, and topicalization in Lebanese Arabic. A wh-phrase or a topicalized phrase can be fronted across a CLLDed element derived by movement but not across a base-generated one. ... Full text Cite