Browsing by Subject "Arabic language"
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Item From Tahdhiib al-Amma to Tahmiish al-Ammiyya : in search of social and literary roles for standard and colloquial Arabic in late 19th century Egypt(2009-12) Baskerville, John Cornelius; Brustad, Kristen; Al-Batal, Mahmoud; Di-Capua, Yoav; El-Ariss, Tarek; Mohammad, MohammadArabic language ideology that views the colloquial as a threat to the standard language and fears a public role for the colloquial register remained prevalent throughout much of the twentieth century. Yet, in late nineteenth-century Egypt, the Nahda project of disseminating knowledge to ‘the masses’ gave rise to several journals that found a public role for Ammiyya, introducing it into the realm of written knowledge. This study analyzes the processes of introducing Ammiyya into the written realm and the subsequent attempt at reeling the register back in from the public sphere. Through a framework of the sociolinguistic analysis of style and the process of iconization, Part I analyzes Abdallah al-Nadim’s use of language variation in his journal, al-Ustaadh, and how it aided in sorting out contradiction between ideology that hailed the standard as the suitable public register and practice that conceded a role to the colloquial. This study argues that even as his journal published didactic dialogues in Ammiyya, Nadim’s language practice chipped away at the prospect of a sustained literary role for the colloquial through the use of ‘styles’ that aligned the standard with authority and a keen understanding of the modernity project and through indexing the colloquial with the backward realm of uneducated women. Through the framework of the process of ‘erasure', Part II analyzes linguistic practices aimed at reeling the colloquial back in from the realm of written knowledge. It demonstrates Nadim’s efforts - near the end of the publication of his journal - to erase the notion that an educated Egyptian would have any use for the register. Nadim removed the salient features of Ammiyya from his dialogues and scolded his interlocutors who displayed their backwardness through the continued use of the features. Late nineteenth- century works, such as Hasan Tawfiq’s Usuul al-Kalimaat al-Ammiyya, represent a continuation of the ideology-practice dialectic from Nadim’s attempted erasure of the colloquial. However, whereas Nadim erased salient features of the colloquial from his writings, these works attempted to trace Ammiyya terms back to their assumed Fusha origins, with the aim of unifying the language by erasing the register.Item Negative concord in Levantine Arabic(2010-08) Hoyt, Frederick MacNeill; Baldridge, Jason; Beaver, David I.; Beavers, John; Abboud, Peter F.; Benmamoun, Abbas; Steedman, Mark J.This dissertation is a study of negative concord in Levantine Arabic (Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria), where negative concord is the failure of an n-word to express negative meaning distinctly when in syntagm with another negative expression . A set of n-words is identified, including the never-words <ʔɛbadan> and "never, not once, not at all," the negative minimizers and "nothing," and the negative scalar focus particle "not (even) (one), not a (single)." Each can be used to express negation in sentence fragments and other constructions with elliptical interpretations, such as gapping and coordination. Beyond that, the three categories differ syntactically and semantically. I present analyses of these expressions that treat them as having different morphological and semantic properties. The data support an ambiguity analysis for wala-phrases, and a syntactic analysis of it with never-words, indicating that a single, uniform theory of negative concord should be rejected for Levantine Arabic. The dissertation is the first such work to explicitly identify negative concord in Levantine Arabic, and to provide a detailed survey and analysis of it. The description includes subtle points of variation between regional varieties of Levantine, as well as in depth analysis of the usage of n-words. It also adds a large new data set to the body of data that has been reported on negative concord, and have several implications for theories on the subject. The dissertation also makes a contribution to computational linguistics as applied to Arabic, because the analyses are couched in Combinatory Categorial Grammar, a formalism that is used both for linguisic theorizing as well as for a variety of practical applications, including text parsing and text generaration. The semantic generalizations reported here are also important for practical computational tasks, because they provide a way to correctly calculate the negative or positive polarity of utterances in a negative concord language, which is essential for computational tasks such as machine translation or sentiment analysis.Item Vowel terminology as a method for dating early Arabic grammatical texts : a case study of Kitāb al-jumal fī l-naḥw(2014-08) Martins, Katie M.; Brustad, KristenMiddle Eastern StudiesItem Word-final imaala in contemporary Levantine Arabic : a case of language variation and change(2011-05) Durand, Emilie Pénélope; Brustad, Kristen; Al-Batal, MahmoudThe phenomenon of word-final imaala, or taa-marbuuTa raising, in the Levantine dialects of Arabic was well documented about 50 years ago by renowned Arabists who described the phenomenon as a purely phonological one. Today, after some major historical and sociological changes have taken place in Arab societies, this feature deserves to be revisited since this might shed some light on the processes of language change in those societies. The scope of this paper is to look into the issue of word-final imaala in contemporary Levantine Arabic (specifically after raa) through a wide lens, and to establish 1) whether there are patterns governing the production of taa marbuuTa after raa, and 2) whether the existing phonological rules account for all instances of word-final imaala as they appear in the speech of Levantine speakers nowadays. In order to do that, instances of all word tokens ending in -ra were extracted from 252 phone conversations recorded in 2004 and found in the LDC Levantine database. Those tokens were analyzed and the word-forms they represent were divided based on whether they exhibit any instances on word-final imaala. It soon became clear that the existing sound rules cannot account for all current instances of taa-marbouTa raising. Two main factors were identified as having a possible effect on the production of taa marbuuTa after raa: word frequency and phonological word classes. Because of a lack of speaker-related information in the database coupled with some imaala-related discrepancies found in the transcriptions of the conversations, it was impossible to determine the exact social meaning(s) of word-final imaala in Levantine communities. However, this study shows that enough changes have taken place since the 1960’s in terms of taa-marbuuTa raising, to consider it a case of language change in progress. This study also establishes some hypotheses which can be used as the base for a future sociolinguistic study whose scope will be to assign social meaning to word-final imaala in Levantine dialects.