Circumstantial Qualifiers in Semitic The Case of Arabic and Hebrew

With inspiration from the Arabic hal-concept this book investigates circumstantial clauses in Arabic and Hebrew. It formulates a modern linguistic definition of the concept of 'circumstantial qualifier' and offers corpus-based pilot studies on circumstantial qualifiers in Pre-classical and Classical Arabic, Pre-exilic Hebrew, Modern literary Arabic and Modern spoken Gulf Arabic. With 'circumstantial clause combining' as the basic analytic concept Bo Isaksson presents a study of comparative ancient Arabic and ancient Hebrew text linguistics applied to a corpus of narrative prose texts. As a corollary Isaksson also presents a reconsideration of the so-called 'tenses' in Arabic and Hebrew. Helene Kammensjo investigates the logic behind the remarkable variation of circumstantial qualifiers (CQ) in a choice of Arabic novels from the two last decades. Her approach is to pick out a few frequent CQ constructions and do a systematic study. Maria Persson surveys the forms and functions of CQs both separately and in relation to their head clauses and discusses areas of grammaticalization and ambiguity related to CQs in Gulf Arabic dialects on the basis of texts from her own field studies.