Little has been written, in the modern scholarship of Arabic linguistics tradition, on the actual elicitation techniques or procedures of data collection as implemented by traditional Arabic linguists. Knowing this aspect is crucial not only for determining the reliability of the collected data, but also the degree of confidence with which to approach relevant hypotheses made with respect to both (Arabic) linguistic analyses and the history of the Arabic language and its dialectal varieties. This paper deals with the instrumentation used by traditional Arabic linguists in collecting their data and some of the most significant considerations they took into account as they undertook field linguistics. The paper will be divided into two main parts. In the first part, data collection procedures will be dealt with by focusing on five issues related to: (I) background of informants, (II) gender of informants, (III) criteria of informant selection; (IV) elicitation techniques, and (V) methods of actual data recording. In the second half of the paper, a comparison of data elicitation techniques will be made between techniques conducted by traditional Arabic linguists and those conducted by modern linguists. Such a comparison is necessary in order to examine what data collection procedures entail as well as to arrive at an accurate understanding of the notions of reliability and determinacy as well as the extent with which to characterize the Arabic linguistic data collected within the Arabic grammatical tradition. The discussion of the Arabic data collection procedures is limited to the period from 8th to 10th Century which happens to be the formative years of the tradition. Primary sources belonging to the period are relied on, including: grammatical treatises (Al-Khalil Ibn Ahmad Al-Farahidi, Sibawayhi, Az-Zaggagi, and Ibn Jinni), lexicons (Ibn Durayd, Al-Jawhari, and Al-Azhari), poetry compilations (Al-Asma'i, Al-Qurashi, and Al-Asbahani), and mixed literary and linguistic works (Al-Mubarrid, Al-Qali, and Al-Jahidh).

Moroccan society is socially and linguistically diverse, and its cultural make up is one of the richest in the Maghreb (i.e. North African countries). Its strategic location at the crossroads of Africa, Europe and the Middle East has made Morocco open to a variety of linguistic influences. The cultural and linguistic context of Morocco has been characterized by the significance of Standard Arabic as well as by the presence of Berber, Moroccan Arabic, French, and to some extent Spanish and English, which has been seen as a proof of the country existing multilingualism. The Moroccan language market splits into two categories. The first includes Moroccan Arabic and Berber, which constitute a weak social and symbolic capital. The second category involves French and Standard Arabic which are the institutional languages and have a strong social capital. Therefore, there exists a rivalry and power struggle between languages within the same category as between the two separate categories. This Moroccan linguistic complexity has recently become more prominent as a consequence of globalization. The phenomenon of globalization coupled with the increasing hegemony of English, has made Standard Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, Berber and French face cultural, linguistic and political demands. English is the most popular language nowadays in Morocco and is becoming a serious rival of French in frequency of use. It is penetrating Moroccan academic life. The number of students studying English as their major increased and English teaching staff grew steadily. Globalization has also triggered new dynamics of political and cultural transformations in Morocco that led to the revitalization and recognition of Berber as legitimate language in education after years of marginalization. This presentation is an attempt to understand this intricate diversity and plurality in Morocco and how globalization has shaped the configuration of sociolinguistic stratification and education within the Moroccan society.

This paper offers a linguistic reading of the Egyptian poet Abdel Rahman Al- Abnoudi who, in his own words in Al-Ahram Weekly 2008, "... have elevated the status of poetry and poets among the poor and among the fellaheen (peasants) who wear galabiyyas". In 2001, the Egyptian poet Abdel Rahman Al-Abnoudi received the Egyptian State Merit Award for poetry, becoming the first poet writing in Egyptian colloquial Arabic to receive the award. In a TV interview for the Egyptian Satellite channel "Dream TV" in 2008, Al-Abnoudi commented: "I chose to write in the Upper Egyptian colloquial as a statement and as a mediator between me and the people". Starting to write poetry in the 1950s, Al-Abnoudi's poetry narratives ranged from representations of the Upper Egyptian woman-figure, to writing to the disinherited majority that had been more or less excluded from literature, to periodic political loud interventions. In addition, the 30 years Al-Abnoudi spent collecting and raising awareness of the epic poem "The Biography of Bani Hilal", a work that has been recited for centuries is another source of great pride to him. Al-Abnoudi's contribution shows a curious relation/tension between personal and social pressures. It is at once co-operative and face threatening. It is a step towards the achievement of some personal goal, but it is put together in the knowledge that the goal can only be achieved through the construction of a specific argument through discourse. His dynamic concepts of 'nation', 'revolution', and 'identity' are thus less amenable to definition solely within political space. One has to examine El-Abnoudi's language together with other semiotic systems as discourses which not only reflect power relations in the Egyptian society throughout more than five decades, but also play a crucial role in the way El-Abnoudi's readers (or listeners) construct representations of who they are, and which groups they identify with. Conducting this linguistic analysis, this paper utilizes a descriptive system outlined by Teun van Dijk (1985, 2004) that examines: indications of interaction; the position of the author with reference to the text; indications of argument; indications of self-reference; and the dominant verb form to offer a critical discourse analysis and an analysis of the argument structure in the poetry of Al-Abnoudi. The paper also analyses the distribution of features and levels of delicacy in the Egyptian colloquial used as a medium for the poems.

Diachronic Development of Arabic Auxiliaries: A Corpus-Based Study Cursory synchronic review of the verb form raaHa 'leave, go' reveals unmistakable polyfunctionality. Making use of the standard grammaticalization theory in the analysis of diachronic coups data from pre-medieval times until the twentieth century, this paper argues that in Classical Arabic (CA) the andative (i.e., movement away from the speaker) sense of raaHa was primary and the emergent auxiliary-like function to an inceptive aspect marking on lexical verbs in 'doubly-inflected' verb periphrasis was minor (2.03%). A notable reversal of the functional status of raaHa was observed in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when roughly two thirds of its textual frequency was as an inceptive aspect marker, mostly in perfective/past inflection. Above and beyond its grammaticalization in CA/MSA, without inhibiting codification raaHa further grammaticalizes into an affix (e.g., raH- > Ha-) in a few modern dialects of Arabic (MDA), often in phonetically mutated forms (Levantine raH- > laH-, and Egyptian Ha- > ha-) that mark (1) unexpected and expected sequentiality; (2) deontic and epistemic modality; (3) futurity notions pertaining to intention, prediction, and simple future. Presenting a natural gradational grammaticalization pathway cutting across Arabic varieties, this paper further argues against the presumed discreteness of CA/MSA/MDA grammars. It relates synchronic polyfunctionality to diachronic continua, establishes the unevenness in the evolution of raH- in compared MDA, and hence suggests the non-inevitability of grammatical maturation for grammaticalizing elements. Finally, it proposes that maturation of auxiliaries in Arabic proceeds in MDA despite the socio-linguistic privileging of CA/MSA over MDA.