Includes bibliographical references (p. 468-479) and index.

Preliminary Material -- ARABIC AND THE ISSUE OF STANDARD LANGUAGE -- INTERMEDIATE FORMS—‘MIXED STYLES’ -- VARIANTS OF COMPLEMENTIZERS WITH THE EMBEDDING OF NOUN CLAUSES (“THAT”-CLAUSES) -- DEMONSTRATIVES -- THE EXPRESSION OF NEGATION -- THE RELATIVE PHRASE -- PRONOUN SUFFIXATION -- RESULTS, INTERPRETATION, AND CONCLUSIONS -- SEQUENTIAL PRESENTATION OF VARIANTS -- TRANSCRIBED TEXT -- TRANSLATION OF TEXT -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX.

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This volume deals with the linguistic behaviour of Egyptian academics in a specific setting: the panel presentation - assumed to represent a discourse genre, to which speakers will respond with some kind of similar stylistic norm, reflected in linguistic choices among variants of a feature. The features selected for investigation are: complementizers, demonstratives, negation, relatives, and pronoun suffixation - all of which have binary variants in the two basic codes available to the speaker, the standard variety and the vernacular. The use of the variants is discussed for each speaker and across speakers, demonstrating certain patterns of distribution (order), but also a high degree of variable usage (chaos). The investigation is set in a wider comparative sociolinguistic framework.