Arabic and the Case against Linearity in Historical Linguistics

Jonathan Owens, Professor Emeritus, Bayreuth University

Jonathan Owens is Emeritus Professor of Arabic linguistics at Bayreuth University. He has published over a dozen books, including A Linguistic History of Arabic (OUP, 2006; paperback 2009) and The Oxford Handbook of Arabic Linguistics (OUP, 2013; paperback 2019). He has created two online oral, text-based databanks, one for the Arabic of the Lake Chad area, and one for Glavda. In 2018 he received the Muhammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Arabic Language Award for special services to the Arabic language.

1. Introduction
Part I. Old Arabic
2. Arabic and Semitic
3. Arabs and Arabic
4. Three types of pre- and early Islamic sources: The pre-Sibawaihian setting
Part II. Reconstruction
5. Punctuation and language history: I/I + D, inheritance/innovation and diffusion
6. Four issues in Arabic historical linguistics
Part III. Contact
7. Arabic in contact: Aramaic
8. Morphosyntax as an adaptive mechanism I: Idioms
9. Morphosyntax as an adaptive mechanism II: The expansive demonstrative
Part IV. Stability
10. Language stability I: Three case sketches
11. Language stability II: Watching paint dry, or, metrics for measuring language stability
Part V. Taxonomy
12. Towards a typology for historical linguistics
13. Summing up
14. Why Arabic is special, and special for historical linguistics