ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out the complete morphological range of Arabic in preparation for the syntactic treatment to follow, listing the closed classes exhaustively and the open classes by paradigms and tokens. The word level grammatical categories of gender, case, number and definiteness are described, and a brief survey of orthographical and punctuation practices is given. An important subcategory of nouns is the set of space and time nouns whose functions overlap both the adverbs and the prepositions of Western languages. Since in Arabic these always remain nouns, they will be referred to as 'adverbials' and 'prepositionals' in this book, to contrast them with the relatively few genuine adverbs and prepositions. To review the transliteration systems used in the West would be an interesting exercise in cultural history but not directly relevant to the purposes of this book. The one used here exploits the advantages of current word-processing to match each Arabic character with a single Roman letter, thereby avoiding digraphs.
