Jonathan Owens is Professor of Arabic Linguistics at Bayreuth University, Germany. He has published extensively on many aspects of Arabic linguistics; his most recent publications include Arabic as a Minority Language and A Linguistic History of Arabic. Alaa Elgibali is Professor of Arabic and Linguistics at the University of Maryland, USA. He is the author of several seminal publications, including Arabic as a First Language: A study in language acquisition and development, and is associate editor of the four-volume Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics.

Spoken Arabic is different in many respects from literary Arabic. This book is concerned with speakers' intentions and the structural and pragmatic resources they employ. Based on new empirical findings from across the Arabic world this work will be of interest to both students and researchers.

1. Explaining Null and Overt Subjects in Spoken Arabic 2. Word Order and Textual Function in Gulf Arabic 3. Information Structure in the Najdi Dialects 4. Word Order in Egyptian Arabic: Form and Function 5. The Information Structure of Existential Sentences in Egyptian Arabic 6. The Pragmatics of Information Structure in Arabic: Colloquial Tautological Expressions as a Paradigm Example 7. From Complementizer to Discourse Marker: The Functions of 'inno in Lebanese Arabic 8. The (Absence of) Prosodic Reflexes of Given/New Information Status in Egyptian Arabic 9. Moroccan Arabic-French Codeswitching and Information Structure 10. Conversation Markers in Arabic-Hausa Codeswitching: Saliency and Language Hierarchies 11. Understatement, Euphemism, and Circumlocution in Egyptian Arabic: Cooperation in Conversational Dissembling