Egyptian Arabic Perceptual Reports

This paper offers what is to our knowledge the first discussion of the encoding of perceptual reports in Egyptian Cairene Arabic. We build on the analytic framework offered by Asudeh and Toivonen (2012) and in particular their discussion of types of perceptual source, and on the account of perceptual reports in different varieties of Arabic developed in Camilleri et al. (2014). We show that a range of different syntactic constructions are used to encode perceptual reports in the ‘seem/appear’ category in Egyptian Cairene Arabic. This paper offers a description of the main means used for perceptual reports in ECA, illustrating a number of issues which arise for an eventual formal analysis and indicating some of the contrasts with Modern Standard Arabic. We consider how the distinction between individual and eventuality type source introduced in Asudeh 2012 and Asudeh and Toivonen (2012).