This groundbreaking study examines the historical development of the Semitic languages from the point of view of grammaticalization, the linguistic process whereby lexical items and constructions lose their lexical meaning and serve grammatical functions.

Collected in this volume are articles published over the last three decades, which deal with various aspects of Semitic languages in general, the structure of Hebrew, history of Arab grammatical tradition, Aramaic and Neo-Aramaic, Syriac syntax, and particularly with Ethiopian languages (Amharic and Old Amharic Gurage, Harari and Comparative Ethiopian). While discussing general, language-specific and comparative issues, special attention is devoted in these studies to syntax, to the examination of linguistic methodology and to the contribution of Semitics to the Science of language.

This book explains the verbal system of the Aramaic of Daniel in the context of current research on grammaticalization, which, though first mentioned by Meillet in 1912, did not flourish until the beginning of the 1980 s, and has only more recently been applied to the study of Ancient Near Eastern languages. Although various aspects of the Aramaic of Daniel have been subject of numerous studies, including a few exhaustive studies on the verbal system in the last century, it remains among the most difficult to explain. The explanation offered here is coherent with the historical development of Aramaic as well as the observable tendencies in the development of human languages in general.

"Proceedings of a workshop conducted on 8-12 July 2001 at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities commemorating the 10th anniversary of Polotsky's death -- Introduction"--OCLC.

This book is the first wide-ranging study of the grammar of the Babylonian Aramaic used in the Talmud and post-Talmudic Babylonian literature to be published in English in a century.

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2000 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, University of Stuttgart, language: English, abstract: This work places the theory of Transformational Grammar into the foreground presenting it applied to Arabic and partly to Hebrew. In the first part of this work the theory is presented summarizing all rules and principles that are relevant for this subject. In the second and third part of this work the analyses of Abdelkader Fassi-Fehri and Ur Shlonsky are examined with regard to the syntactic structure of Arabic and Hebrew. Finally, it may be observed that this work more or less applies a syntactic theory to a language rather than advancing a new one itself.