Drawing primarily on the data collated by Alluhaybi (2019. Negation in modern Arabic varieties from a typological point of view. London: SOAS University of London PhD thesis), this article first situates Arabic within the crosslinguistic typology of negative strategies put forward, among others, by Miestamo (2005. Standard negation: The negation of declarative verbal main clauses in a typological perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter). It then surveys the main parameters of variation among different varieties of Arabic in the expression of standard negation, non-verbal negation, and negative imperatives, with a particular focus on the issue of the single versus bipartite expression of negation. The article finishes by looking at some recent debates concerning the diachronic evolution of the observed patterns.

This study considers negation in 47 modern Arabic varieties. The types of negation investigated are standard negation and non-verbal negation. The study reveals that negation in Arabic is undergoing a cycle in addition to the Jespersen’s Cycle, which has already been identified by several studies. In the first stage of this additional cycle, a single negator is used to negate both verbal and non-verbal clauses. In the second stage, this negator is attached to a personal pronoun to negate non-verbal clauses only. In the third stage, a new single morpheme is coined and generalised to negate any non-verbal clause. In the fourth stage, this new morpheme is used to negate certain types of verbal clauses. In the last stage, verbal and non-verbal clauses return to be negated similarly, and this newly coined morpheme can negate both of them. In the study, this cycle is referred to as the Arabic negative cycle.

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The aim of this research is to determine appropriate grammatical topics for advanced level learners of Arabic as a second language and measure their mastery of them. In this vein, the descriptive method is applied, as it seems to be the most appropriate one to meet the aims of the study. First, the researcher prepared a questionnaire to determine the appropriate grammatical topics for those learners based on several sources. The questionnaire resulted in 16 topics. Accordingly, the researcher constructed a test to measure the extent to which students were familiar with these topics. The test was applied to a sample of fourth-level students at the Arabic Language Institute for Speakers of Other Languages at King Abdul Aziz University. The total number of students was 94, and the results show that their familiarity was high in 10 topics, average in 3 topics, and low in the other 3 topics. The research recommended that these 16 topics should be included in the grammatical curricula for advanced level Arabic learners. Moreover, there should be mechanisms to prevent overlap and recurrence of these topics in the curricula. The research also suggested applying similar studies to beginner and intermediate learners to prepare lists of topics that reflect their levels in all linguistic aspects. KEYWORDS Grammatical topics, language learning, language proficiency, learning difficulties, learning skills, second language