Uri Horesh discusses how sociolinguistic theory and research are expressed and investigated in Arabic. He focuses on variation, stating that ‘Arabic as a natural language… exhibits and has always exhibited, a vast degree of variation’. He explores gender, class, and age as variable factors in language change, and the effects of urban/rural differences. Horesh aims to specify how research in Arabic linguistics can enrich concepts in sociolinguistics, especially as pertains to phonological processes. He examines Labov’s concept of chain shift for both vowels and consonants in Arabic dialects, and suggests how both quantitative and qualitative research findings in Arabic can contribute to sociolinguistic theory.

The contribution of our paper is thus twofold. First, it documents the phenomenon of the singulative operation in the Galilee dialect of Palestinian Arabic. Second, we show that the singulative operator is predictably constrained in what nouns it applies to, and that the output of the operation varies depending on the properties of the denotation of the input noun - whether it denote liquids, granular substances, solid matter or a collection of individuals. To the best of our knowledge, while the singulative operation is recognized as part of Modern Standard Arabic grammar as well in at least some dialects, this kind of systematic semantic mapping between denotation of the input and denotation of the output has not yet been carried out before.