Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on Sudanese Arabic, because this provides beautifully clear examples of key analytical notions. It highlights a basic semiotic framework for grammar and para-syntax, introducing the notions predicand and predicate as traditional syntactic features of Arabic, and arguing, on the basis of Dickins, for an ‘equative’ analysis of bipartite clauses in Sudanese Arabic, and by extension other Arabic varieties. The book considers theme and rheme as real-world informational notions. It argues that the Hallidayan semantic definition of ‘theme’ and ‘rheme’ is uninterpretable and as such not acceptable. The book also considers recursion and also argues that an analysis involving recursion is always simpler than, and therefore to be preferred to, one not involving recursion, thereby opening the way to a recursive analysis of complex para-syntactic structures in Arabic. It investigates the Peri/Thema–Nuc/Rhema analysis of Standard Arabic.