Copyright

Wiktor Gębski

Published On

2024-04-15

Page Range

pp. 261–384

Language

  • English

Print Length

124 pages

6. Syntax of verbs and Clauses

Chapter of: A Grammar of the Jewish Arabic Dialect of Gabes(pp. 261–384)
This chapter includes sections on subordination, expressions of tense and aspect, and word order. The first study explores three types of subordination in Jewish Gabes—relative clauses, adverbial clauses, and complementation—considering both cross-linguistic and Semitic dimensions. Relative clauses are post-nominal, influenced by historical patterns of nominal dependency. Adverbial clauses, historically linked to nominal dependency, involve coordination for rendering relations. The analysis of complementation emphasises the influence of the matrix predicate's semantics on the complement's syntactic structure, and includes a semantic taxonomy. The second section explores aspectual and temporal values of the prefix and suffix stems. In addition, compound forms involving auxiliaries and preverbal particles are explained. The final section deals with word-order patterns attested in the narratives and aims to outline the functional differences between the subject-verb and topic-comment alignments.

Contributors

Wiktor Gębski

(author)
Rothschild Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Cambridge
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2577-6553

Dr Wiktor Gębski is a linguist specialising in Arabic dialectology and Hebrew. Hailing from Poland, he completed his BA and MA in Hebrew and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Warsaw. Between 2014 and 2016 he pursued Hebrew and Arabic studies at the University of Tel Aviv as a scholar of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2022 he gained his PhD from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. His doctoral dissertation The Jewish Dialect of Gabes (Southern Tunisia): Phonology, Morphology, Syntax was written under the supervision of Professor Geoffrey Khan. It entailed documentation of this endangered North-African Arabic dialect. The project was based on extensive fieldwork in Israel and France, during which Dr Gebski recorded the last native speakers of Jewish Gabes. For his work towards the preservation of Jewish linguistic heritage, in 2022 he was awarded the Oliver Cromwell Prize in Jewish Studies. Currently, Dr Gebski is a Rothschild Postdoctoral Fellow at FAMES, Cambridge, where he teaches Modern Hebrew and conducts research on Jewish and Muslim varieties of spoken Maghrebi Arabic. His academic interests involve language endangerment, the syntax of spoken Arabic, and language contact between Jewish dialects of Arabic and Israeli Hebrew.