[...]... where the syntax of spoken Arabic differs significantly from that of the formal register, references have also been provided to the grammars of Wright ( 1 898), which, over one hundred years after publication, remains one of the most comprehensive descriptions of Classical Arabic available in English, and to Cantarino's ( 1975) syntax of modem formal Arabic Approaches to the Study of Syntax The primary... linguistic analysis applied In the course of examining the data corpus, the need arose for an analytic framework capable of explaining the kinds of language variation found in spoken Arabic Thus it became Approaches to the Study of Syntax 7 necessary to expand the primary goal of the study to include the outline such a framework The two main methodological approaches to the study of syntax contrast in methodology... knowledge of Arabic structure on the part of non-linguist readers, formal Arabic syntax is not taken as framework for analysis for several reasons First, most grammars of fonnal Arabic do not provide an appropriate model for a functional study of the syntax of spoken Arabic, because they focus on the desinential inflection system.6 Second, the goal here is to describe the syntactic patterns found in the. .. recorded Arabic dialect: Haming ( 1980) compares genitive constructions and the genitive construct (Arabic /i