ABSTRACT
Contemporary theoretical linguistic semantics concerns itself primarily with the relatively narrow but consequential goal of identifying the regularities in the relation between form and meaning in human languages. This chapter discusses some phenomena in Arabic and its varieties that have attracted the attention of semanticists. It describes significant research on Arabic in the areas of the interpretation of number, degree, quantification, quantifier interactions, definiteness, tense and aspect, and derivational verb morphology. Degree constructions are a class of constructions that talk about the degree to which some property or quantity holds, such as superlative and comparative constructions. Research in Europe in the 19th century on the foundations of mathematics led to the development of modern logic, which in turn formed the basis of the development of model-theoretic semantics for human language in the 1960s and 1970s.
