Browsing by Subject "Arabic"
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Item A linguacultural approach to teaching Arabic as a foreign language(2017-01-13) Stokes, Corinne Alden; Al-Batal, Mahmoud; Brustad, Kristen; Raizen, Esther; Blyth, CarlThis dissertation examines theoretical and practical work on culture in fields related to foreign language education (FLE) and Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL) in order to rethink the cultural component of a proficiency-based Arabic classroom and propose a linguacultural approach for the first-year of study. The dissertation has arisen from a decade of observing the field of TAFL from the multiple perspectives of student, teaching assistant, and teacher of Arabic, and is inspired by the contemporary needs of Arabic students in U.S. universities. The principal goals of the dissertation are: 1) to present a critical perspective on the current role of culture in TAFL theory, teaching practice, and textbook design; 2) to propose a linguacultural approach to teaching Arabic that is informed by conceptual and intercultural perspectives in FLE; and 3) to demonstrate the approach by way of suggested methods, outcomes, and assessments designed for novice to intermediate levels of proficiency. The first objective is accomplished in Chapters II and III by a review of scholarship on culture in FLE and a discussion of culture in TAFL as it relates to U.S. universities and the sociolinguistic situation in Arabic. This is followed by a review of Arabic textbooks from a cultural perspective. The second objective is fulfilled by Chapter IV, in which I argue for a linguacultural approach to Arabic language and culture pedagogy, with its central tenet the incorporation of rich and varied Arabic-language input that reflects sociolinguistic realities. In this chapter I develop the relationship between integrated Arabic teaching, multiliteracies, cultural conceptualizations, and interculturality, providing examples of methods and material development. Finally, in Chapter V, I follow the principles of the approach to suggest proficiency-based outcomes and assessment methods in which cultural goals are integrated in all skill areas.Item "Advanced" Arabic : investigating learners’ lexical richness in the context of an oral interview(2013-08) Loomis, Summer; Raizen, Esther, 1951-; Brustad, Kristen; Plakans, Lia; Raz, Adi; Mohammad, MohammadThis study used recordings produced in the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages’ (ACTFL) Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPIs) to investigate the quantity and lexical richness of second language (L2) Arabic speakers’ lexical production. The study focused on 28 full-length tests and 53 sub-samples of narration and description, selected from an initial data set of 115 OPIs. The research questions were: 1) What are the average words and words per minute (WPM) produced by Advanced-Mid rating level test takers in this data set? Do Intermediate-Mid rating level test takers produce fewer words and WPM than Advanced-Mid rating level test takers? Do Superior rating level test takers produce more words and more WPM than Advanced-Mid speakers? 2) What is the lexical variation in the Advanced-Mid samples as measured by type-token ratio (TTR)? Is this variation higher or lower than the lexical variation of test taker samples at the Intermediate-Mid and Superior rating levels? 3) How many shared words produced by learners at the Advanced rating levels are from beyond the 2,000 most frequently used words in Arabic according to Buckwalter and Parkinson’s frequency dictionary (Buckwalter and Parkinson 2011)? 4) What qualitative observations can be made about test takers’ narration and description attempts at the Advanced rating levels? How do these attempts compare to narration and description attempts by test takers at the Intermediate and Superior rating levels respectively? The WPM and TTR values for the Advanced-Mid rating level differentiated this test taker speech from the Intermediate-Mid rating level speech. However, the WPM and TTR measures did not distinguish between the Advanced-Mid rating level and the Superior rating level test takers. In regards to word frequency, learners at the Advanced-Mid rating level did not produce shared words that were beyond the 2,000 most frequently used words in Arabic. However, the qualitative observations of the Advanced rating levels’ descriptions and narrations appeared to show a difference between this group’s lexical resources and those of the Intermediate and Superior rating levels. These findings and related suggestions for future research on the advanced L2 speaker of Arabic were also discussed.Item Affective geographies : Virginia Woolf and Arab women writers narrate memory(2016-06-14) Logan, Katie Marie; El-Ariss, Tarek; Cullingford, Elizabeth; Grumberg, Karen; Wilkinson, Lynn; Carter, Mia; Cullingford, ElizabethAffective Geographies engages a cross-cultural group of writers who long for lost places and pasts but express that longing critically. The writers articulate affective memories to contest linear and politically legible narratives about place. I focus on nostalgia and forgetting to theorize a memory practice in which authors navigate ambiguous, ongoing loss. I construct an associative canon of women writers like the contemporary Arab authors Miral al-Tahawy, Leila Ahmed, Hoda Barakat, Ghada al-Samman, and Jean Said Makdisi and the British Modernist Virginia Woolf. Scholars who read these authors globally often shy away from explorations of affect, particularly nostalgia or sentimentality. I advocate, however, for a comparative reading that emphasizes the authors’ aesthetic and affective resonances despite the differences in their contexts, audiences, and publication histories. Each writer uses personal experience, ambivalent feelings, and complex memory structures to claim and re-narrate their own histories, pushing back against dominant political narratives and becoming sources for critical reflection. Female writers in particular use affective memory to contest gender-based distinctions in the political and domestic spheres. In Chapter One, I describe how autobiography and memoir projects from Leila Ahmed, Virginia Woolf, and Leonard Woolf introduce ambivalent feelings about the past to leave their narration of complex histories open. I develop a theorization of ambivalent nostalgia in order to compare three disparate authors with diverse relationships to colonial and domestic histories. In Chapter Two, I argue that Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Miral al-Tahawy’s Brooklyn Heights reconfigure the negative connotations of female memory, most notably sentimentality, as a practice of empathy and community formation rather than an exercise in backwards-gazing. I demonstrate that in both novels, the act of walking through city space provokes a dynamic and embodied form of memory. In Chapter Three, I explore how Woolf and Hoda Barakat resist medical discourses that seek to pathologize experiences of desire, longing, and female narration. Finally, Chapter Four details how forgetting can become an essential tool for narration, allowing the writer to shape and renegotiate her past.Item An acoustic analysis of pharyngeal and emphatic consonants in Iraqi Arabic(2017-12-06) Faircloth, Laura Rose; Crowhurst, Megan Jane; Myers, ScottEmphatic consonants in Arabic are coronal obstruents with a secondary articulation. The exact place of the secondary constriction is debated, though these consonants are often said to be pharyngealized. The emphatic consonants contrast with plain coronal obstruents and pharyngeal fricatives. Emphatic consonants also affect adjacent and non-adjacent vowels through a process of emphasis spread, usually by F1 raising and F2 lowering. A production experiment in Iraqi Arabic examined the acoustic patterns of plain, emphatic, and pharyngeal consonants and adjacent vowels. Acoustic measurements of the first and second formants of the low vowel /a/ and the high front vowel /i/ before and after the consonant were analyzed, as well as center of gravity of the fricatives. This experiment found that F1 was higher adjacent to pharyngeal and emphatic consonants than adjacent to plain consonants. F2 was lower adjacent to emphatic consonants than adjacent to plain and pharyngeal consonants. These results suggest some similarities in the articulation of pharyngeal and emphatic consonants, but that emphatic consonants have a slightly different constriction for the secondary articulation than the constriction for pharyngeal consonants. Vowels adjacent to pharyngeal consonants also did not have the characteristic F2 lowering associated with emphatic consonants and emphasis spread. The center of gravity of pharyngeal /ħ/ was lower than the center of gravity for plain /s/ and emphatic /sˤ/, but there was no difference in the center of gravity values for the plain and emphatic fricatives. Combined with the F2 lowering of vowels adjacent to emphatic consonants, this suggests that the perception of emphatic consonants may be primarily triggered by the adjacent vowel, not the consonant itself. The results of this experiment motivate future analyses of the relationship between the effects of emphatic consonants on adjacent vowels and the perception of emphatic consonants.Item The Arabic verb : root and stem and their contribution to verb meaning(2011-12) Glanville, Peter John; Brustad, Kristen; Al-Batal, Mahmoud; Mohammad, Mohammad A.; Wechsler, Stephen; Beavers, John T.This dissertation is a study of the construction of meaning below the word level, specifically how roots and morphemes combine to create verbs, and the contribution of each to the meaning that a verb construes. It uses data from the verb system of Modern Standard Arabic to bring together the theory that roots combine with different structures to produce verbs describing different types of event, and the observation that many roots cannot form verbs on their own, and must combine with other morphemes do to so. The thesis is that Arabic roots lexicalize events, states or things, but remain free to create new meaning in combination with the different verb stems of Arabic, each of which contains one or more morphemes that determine the type of event that a root may come to describe. The findings are that the morphemes present in the different verb stems of Arabic condition verb meaning in four main ways: through reflexivization; through providing an Actor subject argument; through marking plural event phases; and through marking the presence of two relations construed as one event. A root combines with a morpheme that determines the type of event that a verb may describe, and it contributes meaning within the limits set by that morpheme. Thus morphemes do not modify a fixed concept, but root and morpheme create verb meaning together. The implication of this for a theory of meaning below the word level is that the semantic concepts which humans communicate remain relatively constant, but they are expressed at different levels of granularity: at the root level; by combining roots below the word level; by combining roots with morphemes below the word level; and by combining words at the clause level. This opens up avenues for further research to establish the differences, if any, between the meanings construed at these different levels of granularity.Item Arabic-English codeswitching: Negotiating social networks in Amman, Jordan(2012) Heckenlaible, VictoriaItem Behind the Linguistic Landscape of Israel/Palestine : exploring the visual implications of expansionist policies(2014-05) Carey, Shaylyn Theresa; Brustad, KristenThe concept of the Linguistic Landscape (LL) is a relatively new and developing field, but it is already proving to illuminate significant trends in sociocultural boundaries and linguistic identities within heterogeneous areas. By examining types of signage displayed in public urban spaces such as street signs, billboards, advertisements, scholars have gained insight into the inter and intra-group relations that have manifested as a result of the present top-down and bottom-up language ideologies. This paper will apply LL theory to the current situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories through a discussion of the various policies that have shaped the Linguistic Landscape. It will begin by examining the Hebraicization of the toponymy after the creation of Israel, then discuss the conflict over the linguistic landscape, which can be seen in several photographs where the Arabic script has been marked out or covered. Moving forward, this work will address the grammatical errors on Arabic language signs, which reflect the low priority of Arabic education in Israel. Finally, this project will expand upon the LL framework by looking at the economic relationship between Israel and the Palestinian territories and how it is reflected in public places, such as supermarkets, which display an overwhelming presence of Hebrew. Through the use of photographic evidence of the LL from the region, which shows the prevalence of Hebrew place names, Israeli economic goods, and negative attitudes towards the use of Arabic on signage, this paper will take a multidisciplinary approach at examining the history and policies that shape the language used in public urban spaces. The relationship between the state and the Linguistic Landscape sheds light on the power dynamics of a multilingual space. As Hebrew is given preferential treatment, despite the official status of both Arabic and Hebrew, Israel continues to dominate the social space with the use of Hebrew in order to assert their claims to the land. In addition to investigating the power dynamics that are reflected on visual displays of language in this region, this work serves as a meaningful contribution to the Linguistic Landscape by expanding its methodology and units of analysis.Item Border fiction : fracture and contestation in post-Oslo Palestinian culture(2013-12) Paul, William Andrew; El-Ariss, Tarek; Grumberg, KarenThis dissertation delves into a body of Palestinian literature, film, and art from the past two decades in order theorize the relationship between borders and their representations. In Israel and Palestine, a region in which negotiating borders has become a way of life, I explore the ways in which ubiquitous boundaries have pervaded cultural production through a process that I term “bordering.” I draw on theoretical contributions from the fields of architecture, geography, anthropology, as well as literature and film studies to develop a conceptual framework for examining the ways in which authors, artists, and filmmakers engage with borders as a space to articulate possibilities of encounter, contestation, and transgression. I argue that in these works, the proliferation of borders has called into question the Palestinian cultural and political consensus that created a shared set of narratives, symbols, and places in Palestinian cultural production until the last decade of the 20th century. In its place has emerged a fragmented body of works that create what Jacques Rancière terms “dissensus,” or a disruption of a cultural, aesthetic, disciplinary, and spatial order. Read together, they constitute what I term a “border aesthetic,” in which literature, film, and art produce new types of spaces, narratives, and texts through the ruptures and fractures of the border. I trace the emergence of this aesthetic and the new genres and forms that distinguish it from earlier Palestinian literary, political, and intellectual projects through analyses of the works of Elia Suleiman, Sayed Kashua, Raba’i al-Madhoun, Emily Jacir, Yazid Anani, and Inass Yassin. In their attempts to grapple artistically with the region’s borders, these authors, directors, and artists create new codes, narratives, vernaculars, and spaces that reflect the fragmentation wrought by pervasive boundaries. These works, fluent in multiple mediums, genres, and languages, reveal both the possibilities and the limits of this aesthetic, as they seek to contest borders but nevertheless remain bound by them.Item Code-switching in the determiner phrase : a comparison of Tunisian Arabic-French and Moroccan Arabic-French switching(2010-12) Post, Rebekah Elizabeth; Birdsong, David; Bullock, Barbara E.Code-switching (CS) between French and Arabic is common across North Africa and in parts of the Middle East. Many researchers have examined this phenomenon in Tunisia (Belazi 1991, Lawson & Sachdev 2000, Belazi et. al 1994) and Morocco (Abbassi 1977, Bentahila 1983, Bentahila & Davies 1983, Lahlou 1991, Redouane 2005.) Corpus and elicited data from these two countries has helped form the basis of proposed universal constraints on code-switching, specifically the Functional Head Constraint (FHC) (Belazi et al 1994) and the Complement Adjunct Distinction (CAD) (Mahootian and Santorini 1996). However, CS between French and Moroccan and Tunsian dialects has not been directly investigated within a single study. This study is a step in filling that gap. Using a web-based survey, the present study examines native dialect speakers’ ratings of authenticity of sentences that contain both French and Arabic with a switch occurring in the Determiner Phrase (DP). The syntactic structure of the DP in the dialects examined is the same, (DP = D (D) N (A)). This is similar to the DP in French (DP = D (A) N (A)) with a few key differences that make it possible to test the FHC and CAD within the DP alone. An example of one of the eight possible switch types, between an Arabic Demonstrative Determiner and a French Definite Determiner, is seen here between Moroccan Arabic and French: Men dima had l’homme n’aime pas les chiens. (Since always this the man doesn’t like dogs.) A mixed-model ANOVA performed on the participants’ ratings reveals main effects for dialect, sex and switch type. Significant interactions also exist, including an interaction between switch type, sex and dialect. While further research is needed, the results indicate that syntactic constraints may not be the only way to understand the practice of CS. Instead, a typological approach, as suggested by Muysken (2000), may lead to a more complete understanding of why and how communities use multiple languages.Item Contact-induced grammaticalization as an impetus for arabic dialect development(2018-04-23) Leddy-Cecere, Thomas Alexander; Brustad, Kristen; Law, Danny, 1980-; Huehnergard, John; Epps, PatienceThis dissertation proposes contact-induced grammaticalization as an account for the widespread occurrence of functionally analogous but etymologically distinct grammatical innovations across modern Arabic dialects. Similarities in functional and semantic details of these grammatical items argue for interrelated development, while diversity in form rules out an origin in common inheritance or matter-based borrowing. The dissertation proposes that these developments are products of the diffusion of grammaticalization pathways between neighboring dialects by means of replication. This hypothesis is evaluated using a sample of attested realizations of three relevant classes of developments (future tense markers, temporal adverbs meaning ‘now’, and genitive exponents) drawn from eighty-one modern Arabic varieties, examined by means of a three-part heuristic which assesses 1) the status of individual innovations as examples of grammaticalization, 2) the multiple replication of attested grammaticalization pathways, and 3) the geographical distribution of modern reflexes as indicating a history of areal diffusion. The results demonstrate substantial evidence for the role of contact-induced grammaticalization in all three sets of developments examined, and the dissertation concludes by discussing the significance of these findings for the study of Arabic diachrony and contact-induced grammaticalization theory more broadly.Item A cross-dialectical comparison of epistemic modals of possibility in spoken Arabic(2014-05) Cooper, Ethan Alexander; Brustad, Kristen; Wechsler, StephenThis paper examines three dialects of spoken Arabic: Egyptian, Iraqi, and Levantine, which each contain in their respective lexica certain sentential modal expressions. I analyze patterns of usage of these modal expressions by looking at the degree to which the expressions can be considered interpersonal -- that is, the degree to which their use emphasizes the relationship of the speaker and hearer - to the propositional content that he or she is uttering. Ultimately, I conclude that across the dialects of Arabic modals that serve an interpersonal function are considered more objective and appear in contexts that call for propositional content. This contrasts with English, in which modals that serve an interpersonal function do not appear in such contexts.Item Definiteness in the Arabic dialects(2018-10-11) Turner, Michael Lee; Brustad, Kristen; Epps, Patience; Al-Batal, Mahmoud; Russi, CinziaThis dissertation proposes a model, based roughly on Dryer's (2014) REFERENCE HIERARCHY, that can systematically account for variation in the morphosyntactic strategies used to mark different degrees of definiteness and indefiniteness in the Arabic dialects. These primarily spoken varieties display a great deal of diversity in this domain, not only in the forms of the articles and affixes and that they use to mark referential status in noun phrases, but also in the semantic notions with which formal marking strategies can be associated. Although there is some information available in individual Arabic dialect grammars, many of which note the existence of any reference-marking strategies perceived as unique or significant, there has been relatively little comparative work on these strategies and only limited progress toward describing them using cross-linguistically applicable models for semantic typology. The present study fills this gap by providing a case study based, textually supported account of key points of grammatical variation and a preliminary typological classification system for dialects' treatment of definiteness. The goal of this approach is to clarify the discrete semantic parameters that govern the use of marking strategies across a diverse set of Arabic varieties, thereby opening the door for a more thorough comparative analysis of the corresponding forms' semantic properties and diachronic origins.Item Definiteness marking in Moroccan Arabic : contact, divergence, and semantic change(2013-08) Turner, Michael Lee; Brustad, KristenThe aim of the present study is to cast new light on the nature of definiteness marking in Moroccan Arabic (MA). Previous work on the dialect group has described its definiteness system as similar to that of other Arabic varieties, where indefinite entities are unmarked and a "definite article" /l-/ modifies nouns to convey a definite meaning. Such descriptions, however, do not fully account for the behavior of MA nouns in spontaneous natural speech, as found in the small self-collected corpus that informs the study: on one hand, /l-/ can and regularly does co-occur with indefinite meanings; on the other, a number of nouns can exhibit definiteness even in the absence of /l-/. In response to these challenges, the study puts forth an alternate synchronic description the system, arguing that the historical definite article */l-/ has in fact lost its association with definiteness and has instead become lexicalized into an unmarked form of the noun that can appear in any number of semantic contexts. Relatedly, the study argues that the historically indefinite form *Ø has come under heavy syntactic constraints and can best be described as derived from the new unmarked form via a process of phonologically conditioned disfixation, represented {- /l/}. At the same time, MA has also apparently retained an older particle ši and developed an article waħəd, both of which can be used to express different types of indefinite meanings. To support the plausibility of this new description, the study turns to the linguistic history of definiteness in MA, describing how a combination of internal and external impetuses for change likely pushed the dialect toward article loss, a development upon which semantic reanalysis and syntactic restructuring of other forms then followed. If the claim that MA no longer overtly marks definiteness is indeed correct, the study could have a significant impact on work that used previous MA descriptions to make grammaticality judgments, as well as be of value to future work on processes of grammaticalization and language contact.Item The development the use of the negation particles miš and mā…š in Egyptian colloquial Arabic(2010-05) Town, Rosalie Melissa; Pat-el, Na'ama; Schulte-Nafeh, MarthaThe negation system in Modern Egyptian Colloquial Arabic does not follow an obvious set of rules. The particle that negates most verbal predicates also negates nominal predicates, and the particle that negates most nominal predicates also negates verbal predicates. By examining the behavior of these particles over time and comparing them to negation systems in other languages, it is possible to see the reasons for this complicated negation system.Item Dialects in the Arabic classroom : a pedagogical survey of Arabic language learners(2012-08) Weinert, John Orbison; Al-Batal, Mahmoud; Brustad, KristenThe study of Arabic as a foreign language in the US has witnessed a tremendous increase in recent decades, especially in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001. Implementation of modern communicative language teaching methodologies has been complicated by the diglossic nature of the Arabic language, as well as the wide variations between the many varieties of spoken colloquial Arabic; only recently has the field seen a widespread shift towards the teaching of the Arabic dialects at beginning levels of study. As a result of this shift, there exist increasing numbers of Arabic learners who have been exposed to one or more Arabic dialects in addition to the formal written language. This thesis presents the results of an interview-survey of Arabic learners who had studied more than one dialect of Arabic in structured classroom contexts, either in the US or the Arab world, with the goal of determining to what extent such instruction had helped or hindered their progress in the language. Results indicated that a majority of participants believe that despite increased challenges, exposure to multiple Arabic dialects was beneficial to their learning experience, and would advocate for such exposure in beginning and intermediate-level Arabic courses. However, many respondents also cautioned that alternate dialect forms should not be presented with the expectation of active production in class. Participants also commented on the ways in which they felt Arabic dialect instruction could be improved; frequently mentioned issues included further development of formal written materials for dialect study, and increased flexibility and understanding on the part of instructors with regard to classroom use of alternate dialectal forms.Item Does gender affect translation? : analysis of English talks translated to Arabic(2014-05) Hayeri, Navid; Pennebaker, James W.; Hillmann, Michael Craig, 1940-When a text in a foreign language is translated into English, many of the features of the original language disappear. The tools described in this paper can give people who work with translators and translations an insight into dimensions of a culture that may escape the notice of someone not familiar with the source language or culture. A set of computer programs are described that analyze both English and Arabic texts using each language's function word or closed-class words categories. First, the LIWC (Pennebaker, Booth, & Francis, 2007) text analysis program was translated into Arabic. Then, the grammatical dimensions of Arabic function words was determined that served as a basis for the Arabic LIWC designed for Arabic texts. These same Arabic dimensions were used to fit English words into the same categories. A large corpus of Modern Standard Arabic and English text files that have been translated in both directions were used to establish the equivalence of the translated word lists. Then, the uses and applications of the dictionaries for computer-based text analysis within and across cultures are described in the study of influence of gender on translation of TED talks between English and Arabic. Differences were identified in language style between men and women in their English language TED talks, and these features were examined whether they were faithfully maintained in translations to Arabic. The rates of function word use was employed to measure language style. Function words (e.g., pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions) appear at high rates in both English and in Arabic, and they have been shown to provide social, demographic, and psychological information about authors and speakers in English and a variety of other languages. The sample included 328 (196 male and 132 female) TED talks delivered in English from 2004 to 2010 and their translations to Arabic. Rates of function word use in the original and translated texts were examined using the English version of the word counting software. The function word use compared between male and female speakers, male and female translators, and their interaction. The results confirmed gender differences in language style for English texts found in previous studies in English. For example, women used more pronouns, more negatives, and fewer numbers than did men. It was further found that several of the distinguishing language style features between men and women in English disappeared in Arabic translations. Importantly, there was a significant gender difference in the language style of male and female translators: first person singular pronouns, second person pronouns, conjunctions, and prepositions were used more by female translators, and quantity words were used more by male translators, regardless of the gender of the original speaker. This study presents one application of computerized text analysis to examine differences in language style that may be lost or gained in translations. Future research and applications within personality, forensic, and literary psychology, linguistics, and foreign language studies are discussed.Item Durative aspect markers in modern Arabic dialects : cross-dialectal functions and historical development(2017-05) AlShihry, Mona Abdullah; Brustad, Kristen; Huehnergard, John; Al-Batal, Mahmoud; Bullock, BarbaraThis study explores the durative aspectual forms in modern spoken Arabic dialects. It analyzes and compares the synchronic functions and proposes possible paths of diachronic development for the majority of attested durative forms. For the synchronic analysis, the study promotes the role of context in understanding the functions of aspectual forms. It is only through context that we can interpret meanings that forms alone do not express. Observing this principle, the study examines the use of durative markers in a database that is composed of various contextualized texts. Diachronically, the study proposes a refinement of the theory of the locative source for the grammaticalization of durative marking that has become standard cross-linguistically. The approach presented here corresponds semantically with the functions expressed by the durative markers and allows for multiple membership of source lexemes. The major sources that are proposed are stative-continuous, temporal prepositions and emphatic forms. Then, an outline of diachronic development is synthesized from the findings of the synchronic analysis and historical reports of constant population contact to speculate on the possible paths of development for each durative marker from the proposed sources. These paths are considered according to the principles of functional grammar development; i.e., grammaticalization, borrowing and contact-induced grammaticalization. The study examines these different proposals and provides justifications for supporting the most likely cases of development while ruling out the less possible paths. This study concludes with a summary of the most probable paths of development for durative markers in modern spoken Arabic.Item Emphasis and pharyngeals in Palestinian Arabic : an experimental analysis of their acoustic, perceptual, and long-distance effects(2020-05-06) Faircloth, Laura Rose; Crowhurst, Megan Jane; Myers, Scott; Smiljanic, Rajka; Meier, Richard; Watson, JanetArabic has a phonemic contrast between plain coronal obstruents and emphatic coronal obstruents, which have a secondary [+ back] feature with a debated uvular or pharyngeal constriction. These consonants are known to affect F1 and F2 in adjacent low /a/, but the effects on other vowels, the role of these cues in perception, and the long-distance acoustic effects have not been studied. A production study of emphatic consonants (Experiment 1) in Palestinian Arabic compared F1 and F2 of the vowels /a: i: u:/ following plain /s/, emphatic /s [superscript ç]/, and pharyngeal /[h with stroke]/. In comparison to vowels adjacent to plain coronals, F1 was higher adjacent to pharyngeal /[h with stroke]/ and lower adjacent to emphatic /s [superscript ç]/ at the onset, but this effect decreased at the midpoint and offset. F2 was lower adjacent to emphatic /s [superscript ç]/, in comparison to adjacent to plain /s/, and this effect was consistent at the onset, midpoint, and offset. The effects of emphatic consonants were greater in low /a/ than in high /i u/. A perception experiment (Experiment 2) explored the role of these acoustic correlates in the identification of plain /s/ and emphatic /s [superscript ç]/ before low /a:/ and high front /i:/, where stimuli had a frication segment from /s/ or /s [superscript ç]/ and F1 and F2 values varied. Listeners used F2 lowering as a cue to emphatic consonants, but they were also able to rely on slight differences in F1 and the frication to improve their identification overall. A second production experiment (Experiment 3) examined the long-distance effects of emphatic and pharyngeal consonants. Speakers produced F2 lowering in all emphatic environments compared to a plain control, regardless of directionality or locality. Speakers only produced localized F1 raising with pharyngeal consonants in immediately adjacent vowels. These experiments suggest that emphasis is uvularization in Palestinian Arabic, which causes F1 and F2 lowering in adjacent and non-adjacent vowels in comparison to vowels in plain environments, and that listeners use these cues to identify emphatic consonants. Pharyngeal /[h with stroke]/ raised F1 briefly, suggesting that pharyngeals do not have the same phonological effects as emphatic consonants in this dialect.Item Enhancing the capabilities of Arabic learners : language learning strategies in the Arabic classroom(2012-05) Ebner, Gregory Ralph; Al-Batal, Mahmoud; Horwitz, Elaine K.; Raizen, Esther L.; Brustad, Kristen; Raz, AdiSince Joan Rubin opened the discussion of the existence of techniques of memorization, recall, and production that marked the performance of successful learners of foreign languages, the study of Language Learning Strategies (LLS) has expanded into innumerable directions. Such studies have attempted to establish a link between LLS use and improved student performance in the classroom and beyond, determine what drives students to select particular strategies for use, and analyzed the effectiveness of LLS instruction. Few studies have examined the relationship between LLS and the study of Arabic as a foreign language. The present study identifies, among university-level students of Arabic, the LLS whose use is associated with student language success. Using a combination of survey response analysis and classroom observation, the study highlights the benefits of 17 separate strategies and recommends a phased introduction of those strategies to students in order to maximize their potential effect. The study then moves on to explore the role of the Arabic instructor in student strategy use, determining the effectiveness of current methods of strategy instruction and provides recommendations to the Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL) field that may improve the techniques used to impart strategic learning competence to students of the language. In the final section of analysis, the study turns toward the Arabic textbooks that most commonly used in American colleges and universities and examines the level of support that these texts provide to the development of strategic learning methods within students, providing advice to instructors and learning materials developers intended to enhance presentation of strategies. The ultimate goal of these suggestions is improving the overall strategic capability of students of Arabic so that they can become more independent learners, capable of continuing study of the language beyond the boundaries of the university classroom.Item Excavating a linguistic category : on the properties of Ism al-Fi‘l and the limits of Kalām al-‘Arab(2016-08) Butts, Kevin Austin; Brustad, Kristen; al-Batal, MahmoudExamining the occurrence of ism fi‘l murtajal (an obscure lexical class whose words syntactically are verbs, while morphologically resemble irregular nouns) in three early, founding works of Arabic grammar and lexicology, affords analysis of the words’ structures and origins, and informs our understanding of the Classical Arabic linguistic register at whose edges they existed. These works’ terminology for the items differs from modern terms. Said terminology seems furthermore not yet standardized. Many items do not fit into conventional root-pattern morphological analysis, though creative or unprecedented derivational methods render them pliable to Arabic’s triradical morphosyntactic system. Some items do correspond to known roots, and a few are recognizable as basically conventional, if irregular, imperatives. A few times items exhibit archaic or irregular phonetics or morphophonology. This lexeme class’ presence in the performative Classical Arabic (‘arabiyyah) suggests its founding corpus (kalām al-‘arab) was not merely linguistic (i.e., “Arabic language”) but also cultural (i.e., perceptions of ‘urūbah—Arabness—itself).
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