ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses four kinds of reader. The first is the student of Arabic at a relatively advanced level who is looking for a conveniently classified repertoire of forms and constructions. The second type of reader is the specialist in Arabic linguistics, who needs data on which to base theories about Arabic, or to support or refute existing theories, like the different interpretations of the copula, conditional syntax, and so on. The book provides the kind of information which would be relevant to comparative studies, for example, questions of word order, agreement, predication, tense and aspect, and so on. Modern Written Arabic (MWA) also reveals an enormous influence, lexical, syntactic and stylistic, from Western languages: as is well known, for example, journalistic Arabic often consists of material hastily translated from English or French press agencies.
