A Grammar of Faifi

Description

Faifi is an endangered Afroasiatic-Semitic speech form of southwestern Saudi Arabia along the border with Yemen, with roughly 50,000 speakers. This study is partially a comprehensive grammar of this speech form, written from a functional/ typological perspective that emphasizes that the key to comprehending linguistic processes comes from studying the functionality of language and its elements. This thesis introduces the Faifi people, aspects of their culture, and history, and includes a comparative study between Faifi and Arabic, which consists of nineteen linguistic aspects. The thesis introduces the major aspects of Faifi, including: contrastive phonology, syllable structure, pronouns, demonstratives, clitics, nouns, verbs, adjectives, future stems, adverbs, NP and NP related operations, word order, alignments, tense and aspect, relative clause, complement clause and adverbial clause.