Papers by Robert Ratcliffe
The obscure Arabic dialects spoken in Bukhara state of the Uzbek Republic are known to scholars p... more The obscure Arabic dialects spoken in Bukhara state of the Uzbek Republic are known to scholars primarily through the pioneering work of Vinnikov and Tsereteli, especially Vinnikov (1969), a collection of narrative texts collected in 1936, 1938, and 1943 in the two villages of Djogari and Arabkhane. The dialects have generated considerable interest among Arabic dialectologists, and have been investigated from the point of view of dialectology and classical historical (genetic) linguistics , Jastrow 1997a. But the materials are of contemporary interest to a broader linguistic audience because of what they reveal about language contact and syntactic typology. While the dialects are conservative in their phonology and lexicon, they are radically different from other Arabic dialects (and correspondingly similar to the surrounding Persian and Turkic languages) in their syntax and to a lesser extent their morphology. They are so different indeed as to constitute a case of 'metatypy' in the sense of , that is, change of syntactic type. Furthermore they show a configuration of word order properties (specifically RelN alongside NG and NA) which is apparently quite rare (possibly otherwise non-existent) among world languages, to judge by its lack of attestation in the 149 language sample of Hawkins (1983).
This paper discusses developments in the study of Arabic morphology with emphasis on developments... more This paper discusses developments in the study of Arabic morphology with emphasis on developments since the 1980's. It explains the motivations and results of the stem-based or word-based research program, as opposed to the traditional root-based approach.
The high degree of contradiction and incompatibility between two Afroasiatic comparative lexica (... more The high degree of contradiction and incompatibility between two Afroasiatic comparative lexica (Ehret 1995 and Oel & Stolbova 1995) calls into question the reliability of the comparative method at deep time depths. The current paper proposes an explicit probability-based metric for evaluating a proposed reconstruction,
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Papers by Robert Ratcliffe