Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 4 (2000) - The University of ...

K ALJENAIE
testing ground. To what extent are UG principles available to an Arabicspeaking
child from the early language production? And what
developmental patterns characterise the acquisition of Arabic?
The acquisition of western languages has been intensively studied. The
acquisition of Arabic has received a very little attention. There are two
studies that could be mentioned here: Omar (1973) studied the acquisition
of Egyptian Arabic of 37 children (ranging in age from 6 months to 15
years) which mainly focussed on the nominal and adjectival morphology
besides syntax and phonology. One of the major findings related to this
paper is the fact that Egyptian children enter the multiword stage between
2;6-3;0. Second, morphology emerges at the age of 2;6. The second study
was conducted by Abdu & Abdu (1986) on the acquisition of Palestinian
Arabic of their two children. The data reveals early appearance of
grammatical inflections before the age of 2;0 as well as individual
differences in the developmental order and the time of appearance.
Unfortunately, the previous studies lack quantitative measures of
frequency and productivity.
2. The Arabic language and Kuwaiti Arabic (KA)
The Arabic language, which belongs to the Semitic group of languages is
classified as Classical Arabic (CA), Modern standard Arabic (MSA) or
Modern Literary Arabic, and Colloquial Arabic. Classical Arabic is the
language of the Quraan (the Holy book of Muslims). MSA is a written
form of the language and it is used in the media (radio, newspaper, and
television), education, legal and formal texts. The grammar or morphology
of Classical Arabic still applies sufficiently to MSA. However, MSA
differs from Classical Arabic mainly in vocabulary and stylistic features
(Fischer 1997). The expansion of the mass media has led to the popularity
of the MSA (Bulos 1965). Colloquial Arabic dialects are used primarily for
ordinary oral communication and each country in the Arab world is
characterized by its own dialect (Beeston 1970; Bulos 1965; Fischer 1997).
Arabic is a synthetic language and the inflectional markers are realized
in suffixes, prefixes and infixes as well. Often two or three of these
markers combined together. For example: prefixes ma-ktab ‘office’,
infixes in-t-aqala ‘transferred or moved’ and suffixes !ammr-a ‘red-F’
(Owens 1997). The characteristic feature of Semitic languages is their
basis of consonantal roots (CCC), which mostly consist of three
consonants (triliteral) (Beeston 1970). The triliteral root is the most
common type in the language (Erwin 1963). There are some
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