Stephan Procházka gives an overarching view of Arabic dialectology from its beginnings in the nineteenth century to the present day, also providing an overview of the general characteristics of spoken varieties of Arabic wherever those are found. Arabic dialectology examines regional variation using both synchronic (dialect geography) and diachronic (language change) approaches. Although its findings are relevant for the study of universal language tendencies in general, and of comparative Semitics in particular, Arabic dialectology has been widely ignored by theory-driven general linguistics. This may be because Arabic dialectologists have largely been interested in description of the myriad phenomena of the multitudinous spoken varieties of Arabic without concerning themselves much with theory. Lately, however, scholars working in Arabic dialectology have begun to present their work in such a way as to be more accessible to the broader field of linguistics.

Jary and Kissine examine the meaning of imperative sentences, taking the existing relevance-theoretic semantic analysis, in terms of the desirability and potentiality of the described state of affairs, as their point of departure. In their view, a complete account of the interpretation of imperatives has to explain how they can result in the addressee forming an intention to perform an action, and this requires the theory to make room for ‘action representations’ (in addition to factual representations, such as assumptions). They claim that the imperative form is uniquely specified to interface with such action representations.

Robyn Carston discusses the relevance-based on-line construction of ad hoc concepts (or occasion-specific senses), which she takes to be the source of much semantic polysemy (where words are stored with a cluster of related senses). In an attempt to give a full account of polysemy, one that marries the pragmatics of word meaning with the demands of grammar, Carston advocates a split view of the lexicon, with one part narrowly linguistic and computational, and the other an ever-evolving store of communicational units.