Morphosyntax as an adapative mechanism I

Abstract Chapters 8 and 9 describe the much later contact between Arabic and the languages of the Lake Chad area which began about 1400. Chapters 8 and 9 open up new methodological ground in linguistics in general, in that the entire basis of comparison are two large oral corpora, one from the LCA, the other from Egypt, from where ancestral LCA derives. Chapter 8 discusses the dramatic manner in which the idiomatic structure of LCA Arabic which it inherited from its Egyptian Arabic parent has been all but replaced by an idiomatic structure characterizing languages of the Lake Chad area, Kanuri in particular. The idea of lexical realignment is introduced as an explanatory concept to model the significant shift of lexical matching implied in idiomaticity.