Many modern Arabic dialects exhibit asymmetries in the direction of emphasis (for most dialects, pharyngealization) spread. In a dialect of Yemeni Arabic, emphasis has two articulatory correlates, pharyngealization and labialization: within the phonological word, pharyngealization spreads predominantly leftward, and labialization spreads rightward, targeting short high vowels. Since asymmetries in the directionality of spread of a secondary feature are phonetically motivated and depend on whether the feature is anchored to the onset or the release phase of the primary articulation, it is argued that the unmarked directionality of spread should be encoded in the phonology as a markedness statement on that feature. This article considers phonological emphasis in Arabic. It is divided into two parts. I first discuss an article by Davis (1995) on asymmetries in emphasis spread (spread of [RTR]) in two dialects of Palestinian Arabic, and argue for the significance of directionality in emphasis spread. I then present further supporting arguments for a hypothesis regarding directionality of spread by considering data from S . an»ānī, a dialect of Yemeni Arabic, in which emphasis has two articulatory correlates, pharyngealization and labialization, and by discussing the asymmetries in the directionality of spread, particularly of labialization, in this dialect. Emphasis Spread and Grounded PhonologyIn an article on emphasis spread in two modern Palestinian dialects of Arabic, Davis (1995) adopts Grounded Phonology (Archangeli and Pulleyblank 1994) to account for sets of opaque Thanks to Barry Heselwood for spectrographic analysis of my data and for reading and commenting on various drafts of this article; to James Dickins; to Judith Broadbent; and to S. J. Hannahs, Mike Davenport, Phil Carr, and other members of the Phonology Reading Group at Durham University for providing critical comments on earlier versions. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers for LI.

In Classical Arabic and many modern Arabic dialects, syllables ending in VVC or in the left leg of a geminate have a special status. An examination of Kiparsky's (2003) semisyllable account of syllabification types and related phenomena in Arabic against a wider set of data shows that while this account explains much syllable-related variation, certain phenomena cannot be captured, and several dialects appear to exhibit conflicting syllable-related phenomena. Phenomena not readily covered by the semisyllable account commonly involve long segmentslong vowels or geminate consonants. In this paper, I propose for relevant dialects a mora-sharing solution that recognises the special status of syllables incorporating long segments. Such a mora-sharing solution is not new, but has been proposed for the analysis of syllables containing long segments in a number of languages, including Arabic (Broselow 1992, Broselow et al. 1995, Malayalam, Hindi (Broselow et al. 1997) and Bantu languages (Maddieson 1993, Hubbard 1995.

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Word formation in Arabic has traditionally been assumed to involve interdigitation of a consonantal root with a vocalic pattern. This view is adopted by a large number of modern generative morphologists. More recently, however, several morphologists have argued that words in Semitic are formed from fully vocalised stems. In this paper, I argue that in San'ani (the dialect of San'a), and in some other Arabic dialects, there is a class of verbs that have as part of either their denotations or connotations a diminutive sense. I then consider diminutive nouns in the dialect. On the basis of semantic and phonological relationships between diminutive verbs and their non-diminutive counterparts, as well as native speakers' explanations of certain diminutive verbs, and the relationship between diminutive nouns and their non-diminutive counterparts, I argue that while some derivational processes take the root as the basic morphological unit, phonological and semantic similarities between certain stems can only be accounted for by derivation from a fully vocalised stem. I therefore conclude that both root-based and stem-based types of word formation occur.

There is so far only limited research that applies a corpus-based approach to the study of the Arabic language. The primary purpose of this paper is therefore to explore the verb systems of Arabic and English using the Quranic Arabic Corpus, focussing on their similarities and differences in tense and aspect as expressed by verb structures and their morphology. Understanding the use of different verb structures, participles, and auxiliary verbs that are used to indicate time and actions may be one way to improve translation quality betweenArabic and English. In order to analyse these forms, a sub-corpus of two Arabic verb forms and their translations in English were created. The Arabic verbs and their English translations were then compared and analysed in terms of syntactic and morphological features. The following English translations of the Quran were used: Sahih International,