This is a highly challenging, densely conceptualized work which deals with a complex issue, the intersection of gender and number in Arabic.Footnote ^[1]

The book consists of five chapters. The first two deal with gender in Arabic, the third with numerals, the fourth with quantifiers and the fifth with number and nouns. Each chapter contains often detailed descriptive summaries, coupled with a theoretical treatment that embeds the phenomenon in a generativist framework. Abundant tree diagrams helpfully show how the descriptive material is understood within the theoretical framework. The book covers a broad range of material, so in this review I concentrate on the two core areas, gender and number.

Beginning with gender, Arabic has two genders, masculine and feminine. In nouns and adjectives the masculine (m) is unmarked and the feminine (f) is marked by the suffix - $a$ ( $h$ ) or -at, the two variants being morphophonologically determined. I follow Abdelkader Fassi Fehri’s practice in conventionally representing the suffix as -at. The m/f divide is found throughout pronominal, demonstrative, adjectival and verbal agreement.

Fassi Fehri concentrates on the lexical properties of nominal gender and number marking. Many of the functions discussed in the book are recognized in standard grammars of Arabic (e.g. Badawi, Carter & Gully Reference Badawi, Carter and Gully2004: 352–357; Ryding Reference Ryding2005: 120, 124), but others either are not or, in Fassi Fehri’s view, require greater scholarly attention.Footnote ^[2] The functions non-exhaustively include the following, the feminine forms in the right-hand column:

The diversity is striking. The suffix -at may have a singulative function as in (2), in which it is suffixed to a general noun defining a single individual member. It may mark what is nearly an opposite group-identifying function in (3). Natural gender, in (1), accounts for only a relatively small number of all feminine(-looking) nouns. Fassi Fehri does not presume to offer a systematic account of all of these manifestations, mentioning for instance the highly irregular derivational -at (5) only in passing (6, 21). Proceeding empirically, rather than beginning with an assumption about what the meaning of the feminine is, Fassi Fehri dissects the properties of individual functions. He devotes the greatest attention to two, the singulative and the plurative, which I will single out here as exemplifying the original argumentation in the book. Gender divides the universe into noun classes, masculine and feminine in the case of Arabic.

Feminine gender additionally manifests classifier properties. Classifiers individuate according to the properties of the object they classify, for instance their shape or quantity. 𝜃uum ‘garlic’ is a ‘general’ noun as the author terms them and suffixation of the f. The suffix -at has a function analogous to lexical noun classifiers such as ‘head of’ or ‘clove of’: 𝜃uum ‘garlic’ (in general)  → 𝜃uum - at ‘a clove of garlic’ = 𝜃uum ‘a clove of garlic’.

As a classifier, the plurative is a more complicated, though somewhat neglected, category in Arabic linguistics. It designates the X conceived of as a group, and is restricted to animates. It may be formed from a singular, as seen in (6a), or from a plural, as in (6b).

While the plurative is usually marked morphologically as fsg and has fsg agreement, it has properties typical of plurals, for instance, occurring with reciprocal pronouns ( ‘each other’).

Moreover, the plurative alternates with ‘normal’ plural agreement. In (8a) below, the plurative in -at has fsg agreement and is paraphrased as ‘a group of’ jamaaʕatun min lit.: ‘group from’ (43). However, in (8b), it occurs with mpl agreement. The choice of agreement is based on discourse perspective, not grammatical rule.

Besides being a gender class marker and classifier, the singulative and the plurative share another property, which is, Fassi Fehri argues, that both are derived categories in that they create units from either collectives (general nouns), in the case of singulatives such as those in (2) above or, typically, from plurals in the case of pluratives like those in (3a) and (6b) above. Besides their classifier function, therefore, they create units out of more basic (‘atomic’ in the generative model used) or derivationally simpler categories.

The seemingly incongruous agreement marking of both singulatives and pluratives as feminine singular is ‘explained’ by the observation that ‘unities are associated with feminines in Arabic’ (166). In a nutshell, the Arabic feminine has at least the contrastively-defined attributes as listed in the boldface items in (9); the meaning of ‘feminine’ thus emerges from a set of oppositions defined along multiple parameters.

In demonstrating the multidimensional nature of feminine -at, Fassi Fehri opens the way for a more nuanced understanding of its function in Arabic.

The book covers a great deal of ground both in terms of the Arabic, and in terms of the linguistic ideas which inform Fassi Fehri’s analyses. I would call it an ‘ideas book’ which can contribute to understanding issues in Arabic and language typology beyond the generative framework in which the work is framed.

To give an example from the formal domain, Fassi Fehri proposes imparting more structure to a number of morphological patterns than is customarily the case. One of these concerns plurals. Traditionally in Arabic there exists a class of plurals which formally appear to be a ‘plural of plural’ (Sibawaih II: 207). ʔaqwaal ‘sayings’ is a broken plural to qawl ‘saying’ representing the common pattern ʔafʕaal. ʔaqaawiil ‘many sayings, locutions’ is a plural of ʔaqwaal, as can be discerned from other plurals of the pattern faʕaaʕiil, e.g. danaaniir ‘dinars’, sg diinaar, faʕaaʕiil being a pattern dedicated to plurals based on a form containing a long vowel in the stem. However, the author points out that ‘plural of plural’ has no syntactic or morphological interpretation, proposing instead to view the form as ‘a modifier of the mass nP, interpreted as increasing the amount of the substance, basically like “a lot”’ (183). ʔaqaawiil is interpreted as having two numbers: one, a plural of qawl, and a second, regarded as ‘an adjoined modifier’. It is the latter which imparts the distinctive intensive class meaning. Analogous analyses in which the feminine adds a meaning via adjunction in the morphological structure are suggested for Moroccan diminutives (25–26), intensive nouns (27–28; see example (4) above) and taxonomic plurals (183). This analysis is noteworthy in pinpointing the locus of the meaning in a particular segment, integrated as a modifier within the word structure and bearing a discrete morphemic value.

The author’s formal analyses can also provide fruitful leads into other aspects of the language, as in the example in (10) below, taken from his analysis of numerals (Chapter 3). Classical Arabic and some dialects today (e.g. areas of highland Yemen, Werbeck Reference Werbeck2001: 162) are well known for gender polarity in which numerals between 3 and 10 take the opposite gender marking from the gender of the modified noun. Moreover, the polarity is based on the gender of the singular noun.

Whereas this is traditionally described in terms of switching the gender of the noun, Fassi Fehri proposes a different treatment (73–76). He observes that in a numeral phrase, only one member can be overtly marked for feminine. Hence, in the compound numerals 11–19, consisting of units + ten, only the first is sensitive to the polarity constraint, while the tens agrees in gender with the noun. In (11a) for instance, the units is as in (10a) above, but the tens is in masculine form.

The author suggests that it is not gender polarity (in the traditional sense) which is at work, but rather gender suppression: gender is not ‘pronounced’ when the units occurs with a feminine noun, as in (10b) and (11b) above. These examples are to be understood as having an implicit but unspoken feminine marker on the units.Footnote ^[3]

Motivation for the proposal comes from the situation in Arabic dialects. In most, the ‘feminine’ -at has a different distribution. In numeral–noun sequences (akin to the construct state) forms without -at are used, as in (12), from Moroccan Arabic:

In a ‘free’ state, however, e.g. when used in an alternative head–modifier construction as in (13), forms with - $a$ ( $t$ ) are used.

The same alternation, Ø ∼ -at, is found here as in (10) and (11), but under different conditions. Fassi Fehri proposes that here also, in the numeral–noun sequence (12) above, the feminine marker is suppressed (pronounced as Ø), whereas in the free state as in (13) above, it is not.

This challenging proposal finds a common ground between Classical and dialectal Arabic, and suggests an alternative to understanding the contemporary dialectal construction in (12) as a loss of gender polarity (Ferguson Reference Ferguson1959: 624). Classical Arabic (and some Yemeni dialects) and the (other) dialects share a strategy of suppressing a feminine marker, the dialects redistributing the forms according to other functional parameters. Rather than being categorically opposed to one another, the phenomenon in all varieties is based on the same mechanism, suppression of the feminine marker, the difference residing in how the suppression is distributed.

The argumentation in the book is complex and many-faceted so at times sign-posting would have helped. The feminine marking of the plurative, as summarized in (9) above, is elegantly accounted for via its ‘unity’ component. Earlier in the work (17, 33), however, pluratives are considered ‘groups’. It is only much later (156) that this interpretation is expressly revised, which may catch the attentive reader by surprise. Also, one wishes that the publisher had invested somewhat more time and resources in proofreading.

In a field splintered by conceptual shibboleths, methodological and theoretical differences often more reflective of underlying differences of culture and tradition than linguistic substance, Fassi Fehri accesses a refreshingly broad range of sources, even while remaining firmly a generativist. For instance, the idea of plurative is modelled in part on a discussion within Cushitic linguistics (e.g. Tsegaye, Mous & Schiller Reference Tsegaye, Mous, Schiller and Corbett2014: 193). Taken as an invitation to think about the language in the ways suggested by Fassi Fehri, the work marks a major milestone in the study of gender and number in Arabic, and their integration into universal grammar.