Bo Isaksson Libri

The volume presents the results of an international project carried out in cooperation between the Uppsala University, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Lund University and the University of Gothenburg. The questions put forward in the project were: How is hypotaxis marked in Semitic, other than by conjunctions? How does this affect the organization of texts? More specifically, what constitutes a circumstantial clause? To find an answer to these questions, all the major Semitic language families and some modern spoken Semitic dialects were surveyed within the project. Thus, Clause Combining in Semitic: The Circumstantial Clause and Beyond examines how different kinds of clauses combine to a text in a number of Semitic languages (Ethio-Semitic not included). Specifically, many of its chapters examine how circumstantial clauses are coded in individual Semitic languages.

This volume is the outcome of the International Symposium on Clause Linking in Semitic Languages that took place in Kivik, Sweden, from 5–7 August 2012. A strong incentive for the symposium was the renewed interest, in recent years, in the nature of non-main clause linking. Current research has brought into focus the concept of main line and digressions from the main line in various discourse types. The conference invited papers on all related topics with emphasis on “ways of combining clauses other than through relative clause and complement clause constructions”. The eleven contributions presented here deal with clause linking in Arabic dialects, in written Arabic, in Biblical Hebrew, in Ethio-Semitic as well as in East Semitic.

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.