Published Papers by Alexander Magidow
Languages, 2021
Arabic historical dialectology has long been based on a historical methodology, one which seeks ... more Arabic historical dialectology has long been based on a historical methodology, one which seeks to link historical population movements with modern linguistic behavior. This article argues that a nexus of interrelated issues, centered around a general theme of “oldness,” has impaired this work, and proposes basic principles to avoid the misinterpretation of linguistic data. This article argues that there is a strong tendency to essentialize the idea of linguistic conservatism and attribute it to the groups that have archaic features. Against this view, it proposes that linguistic conservatism should be seen as a failure to participate in otherwise widespread innovations. It critiques the assumption that the modern dialect distribution is directly derived from the earliest settlements established during the Islamic conquests in the seventh century, arguing instead that long-term linguistic durability is unlikely. The article further challenges the assumption that highly conservative dialects such as those of Yemen are ancestral to modern dialects in a meaningful way, arguing instead that either more proximate ancestors or wave-like diffusion had a greater impact on the development of modern dialects. Finally, the paper suggests that a heuristic approach based on typical processes of language diffusion and human migration offers a more productive approach to understanding the history of Arabic dialects than a model based on historical events; many of the existing linguistic classifications may be directly derived from this heuristic.
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Arabic In Context: Celebrating 400 years of Arabic at Leiden University, 2017
In trying to understand the history of Arabic, with its many dialects and variants , we are confr... more In trying to understand the history of Arabic, with its many dialects and variants , we are confronted by the difficulty of how exactly we deploy the tools of historical reconstruction. A traditional, tree-based model of a 'proto-language' differentiating into distinct daughter languages is difficult to apply to a language whose dialects have been in constant and complex contact for thousands of years.
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Arabic is a widely-spoken language with a rich and long history spanning more than fourteen centu... more Arabic is a widely-spoken language with a rich and long history spanning more than fourteen centuries. Yet existing Arabic corpora largely focus on the modern period or lack sufficient diachronic information. We develop a large-scale, historical corpus of Arabic of about 1 billion words from diverse periods of time. We clean this corpus, process it with a morphological analyzer, and enhance it by detecting parallel passages and automatically dating undated texts. We demonstrate its utility with selected case-studies in which we show its application to the digital humanities.
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In modern spoken Arabic dialects, the proximal locative demonstrative “here” is derived either fr... more In modern spoken Arabic dialects, the proximal locative demonstrative “here” is derived either from *hunā or *hā hunā, with no dialects preserving both forms or contrasting between them. In formal written Arabic both forms are used, and so this study investigates the contrast between hunā and hā hunā in an 800 million word collection of written Arabic texts in order to shed light on the development of hā hunā in the spoken dialects. The study, however, finds that there is no semantic or pragmatic contrast in the usage of the two phrases, though changes in the relative frequency of use reflect larger changes in the centers of literary production and political power and the dialects of those centers. The study concludes that formal written Arabic must be treated as an autonomous register which has developed according to the needs of that register and therefore written Arabic reflects the spoken language only to a small degree.
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The incredible diversity of Arabic dialects makes it difficult to find linguistic isoglosses that... more The incredible diversity of Arabic dialects makes it difficult to find linguistic isoglosses that can adequately differentiate between dialects across the Arabic-speaking world. This article proposes a diachronically situated classification of the Arabic dialects according to the form of their demonstrative pronouns, illustrated with a sample of over sixty dialects. Four major dialect groups are classified based on the form of their plural demonstratives: Dialects with (1) taː feminine singular, called consonant-alternating dialects; (2) reflexes of plural *haːʔula, called hawla dialects; (3) reflexes of masculine plural *ðaːʔula, often with feminine plurals derived from *ðaːʔila and possibly *ðaːʔala, referred to as ðawla dialects; and (4) Dialects with reflexes of plural *ðuː, called haːðuː dialects. The article compares these groups to established dialect classifications, finding that they reinforce some while calling the validity of others into question.
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This article describes a model for storing multiple forms of linguistic data within a relational ... more This article describes a model for storing multiple forms of linguistic data within a relational database as developed and tested through a prototype database for storing data from Arabic dialects.
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Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies v. 13, 2013
This article investigates speaker choice of variant lexemes and structures when writing in formal... more This article investigates speaker choice of variant lexemes and structures when writing in formal Modern Standard Arabic, using a multiple-choice survey that was distributed to 28 native speakers of Damascene Arabic. The study finds that speakers tend to avoid elements that are common in their local colloquial dialect, even if they are attested and permissible in Modern Standard Arabic, what might be called “negative interference.” However, in some cases interference from the colloquial form is so strong that speakers appear to be confused as to which form is correct (“positive interference”), and when given the choice, prefer to avoid problematic forms altogether. These results suggest that there are a number of competing pressures in diglossia, supplementing previous studies which have primarily found evidence of positive interference from the local dialects on Modern Standard Arabic. This study concludes that this avoidance behavior may explain the historical robustness of diglossia, as well as some of the regional variation that occurs in Modern Standard Arabic.
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Approaching inconsistent case marking in spoken formal Standard Arabic as a linguistic system rat... more Approaching inconsistent case marking in spoken formal Standard Arabic as a linguistic system rather than as errors, this paper finds that the use of case marking is governed by the saliency of nominals, as well as the status of some nominals as fixed idiomatic expressions. The paper also discusses the role of case markings in register variation and personal linguistic style.
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Talks & Unpublished Work by Alexander Magidow
A ~15 minute video demonstrating the features of the Database of Arabic Dialects, a website for c... more A ~15 minute video demonstrating the features of the Database of Arabic Dialects, a website for collaborative collection of Arabic dialect data (http://database-of-arabic-dialects.org/)
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Slides from a presentation given at the AIDA 2015 Meeting in Bucharest.
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Presented at the 7th International Conference on Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa in Ifrane, Morocco, April 2014.
The preliminary work showing in this presentation investigates how a Jordanian comedy series, Bat... more The preliminary work showing in this presentation investigates how a Jordanian comedy series, Bath Bayaakha, challenges the dominant language varieties used in Jordanian media by juxtaposing absurd actions with absurd and inappropriate language. I am still analyzing how the 'Bedouin' language discourse relates to actual linguistic practice in Amman which differs significantly from the 'Bedouin' language lampooned here. I am open to feedback on this presentation also, since this is still research in progress.
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Much of the modern scholarship on Arabic dialectology has taken for granted a relationship betwee... more Much of the modern scholarship on Arabic dialectology has taken for granted a relationship between morphemes of the type /-Vn/ in modern (largely Bedouin) Arabic dialects, which I will argue represent a marker of incipient topics, and the original Early Arabic case markers in /-Vn/. While there is obviously a clear similarity in the phonological forms of these two morphemes, little work has actually been done to determine whether this relationship can indeed be supported with linguistic evidence, and some (Owens 2006) have argued that there is actually no relationship at all between the two morphemes.
In this talk, I will argue that the two morphemes are indeed related, with a breakdown of the case system, attested in the written record, resulting in a reinterpretation of the remaining morpheme, the accusative indefinite marker /-an/, as marking secondary topics (per the framework of Dalrymple and Nikolaeva 2011). However, since this marker could only be used with indefinites, while topics are typically definite, it was further reinterpreted as a marker of incipient topics, that is newly introduced referents that will be topical further on in the discourse (Lambrecht 1994's "brand-new anchored" referents).
Finally, I give a historical overview of the development of this morpheme, from its rise around early Islamic period to its fall in the late medieval-early modern period. The fall, I argue, was likely the result of the loss of the morpheme in major population centers, with an urban-hierarchical pattern of diffusion, probably accelerated by the recasting of the morpheme as a marker of rural identity. Finally, I argue that the modern conception of this feature as being "Bedouin" in nature is a result of the folkloric orientation of studies of Bedouin language, particularly the focus on quantitative metrical poetry which tends to preserve archaic features.
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Case-marking in Arabic has been subject to fierce debate for much of its recorded history, especi... more Case-marking in Arabic has been subject to fierce debate for much of its recorded history, especially the role of the loss of case-markings in the “corruption” of the language. They have not, however, disappeared completely, though in contemporary formal registers, speakers tend to use case-marking sporadically. However, very little modern research has attempted to explain why it is that speakers only mark some words and not others. Parkinson (1994) explains irregular case-marking as a result of the limits of speaker competence, while other research attributes variation in case-marking to the established rules of Quranic recitation (Holes, 2004; Beeston, 1970). Research on register variation has suggested some link between case-marking and register, but only on a very global level (Badawi, 1973; Meiseles, 1980). No attempt, however, has been made to systematically account for when and why speakers chose to case-mark individual words in their speech.
This study takes a discourse analytic approach to determining the conditioning factors which govern the use of case-marking, using both qualitative and quantitative techniques. The corpus of the study consists of approximately 30 minutes of transcribed speech drawn from publicly available unscripted lectures and television broadcasts conducted in formal standard Arabic, with speakers from Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and Lebanon. The approach taken in this study has been to focus on the overlapping and intersecting factors which are implicated in the choice to use case-marking, rather than trying to find a single factor to explain all instances of case-marking.
With regard to previous approaches to case-marking, the quantitative data suggests that speaker proficiency plays a limited role at best. Speakers make mistakes rarely, with only approximately 2% of marked nouns given incorrect case marking. The rules of pause are more difficult to quantify, as speakers never case-marked more than approximately 30% of possible tokens, but a number of examples in the data show that the Quranic rules of pause are generally not followed in either spontaneous speech or even in the
quotation of Quranic verses.
On a qualitative level, the primary finding of this study is that case-marking can be used to mark salience and individuation, such that speakers case-mark those nouns which are highly relevant to the discourse. Building on the individuation hierarchy proposed by Brustad (2000) and Khan (1988) and the concepts of noteworthiness and salience in Ionin (2006), I show that case-marking is often used with highly individuated nominals, but that it is the salience of the nominal, which I view as a constituent property of individuation, that is being marked.
Other factors also appear to play a role in the use of case-marking. There are a number of formulaic idioms and phrases which appear to be memorized with case-marking intact, and therefore have no clear relation to salience, though this study finds that Quranic verses and religious formulae tend to show more flexibility in case-marking than might be expected. Similarly, I show that the register of interaction and speaker style also play a role in how and when case-markings are used.
References
Badawi, S. (1973). mustawayāt al-ʿarabiyya al-muʿāṣira fī miṣr : Registers of Contemporary Arabic
in Egypt. In Arabic. Cairo: Daar Al-Ma’aarif.
Beeston, Alfred F. L. (1970). The Arabic language today. London: Hutchinson.
Brustad, Kristen (2000). The Syntax of Spoken Arabic: a comparative study of Moroccan, Egyptian,
Syrian and Kuwaiti Dialects. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
Holes, Clive (2004). Modern Arabic: Structures, Functions, and Varieties. Washington, D.C.:
Georgetown University Press.
Ionin, Tania (2006). “This is definitely specific: Specificity and Definiteness in Article Systems”.
In: Natural Language Semantics 14, pp. 175{234.
Khan, Geoffrey (1988). Studies in Semitic Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Meiseles, Gustav (1980). “Educated Spoken Arabic and the Arabic language continuum”. In:
Archivum Linguisticum 11.2, pp. 118{148.
Parkinson, Dilworth B. (1994). “Speaking Fusha in Cairo: The Role of the Ending Vowels”. In:
Arabic Sociolinguistics: Issues and Perspectives. Ed. by Yasser Suleiman. Surrey: Curzon.
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In studies on register variation and code-switching in Arabic, the act of writing in highly forma... more In studies on register variation and code-switching in Arabic, the act of writing in highly formal Arabic has largely been ignored, with a bias towards the analysis of texts that exhibit a clear mixing of registers (e.g. Belnap and Bishop 2003). At first glance, formal written texts in the prescriptive fuṣḥā register appear to shed very little light on the mechanics of register shifting. However, this is a misconception: in order to produce a homogeneous text in a single register, the speaker must undertake a complex process of choosing only those words and structures which belong to the targeted level. For a formal fuṣḥā text, a native speaker of Arabic must impose a filter on their every-day language in order to write a text unblemished by colloquialisms. This filtering is responsible for the maintenance of the separation between Arabic registers, a process not acknowledged by most research, which instead assumes an inevitable merging of those registers. It is this process of avoiding colloquial and informal
language in writing fuṣḥā texts that is the subject of this study.
This paper focuses on the results of a multiple choice fill-in-the-blank survey regarding word and structure choice in formal writing which was completed by Syrian native speakers of Arabic (n = 27). Most of the questions in the survey present two or three options, each of which is
present in fuṣḥā but vary in the frequency of their occurrence in the Syrian dialect. A small number of questions present forms which would be considered incorrect in fuṣḥā but which
occur regularly in Syrian colloquial. The structures investigated in the study include words from very different roots (e.g. ḥāsūb vs. kambyūtar), words from the same root but in different inflectional and derivational morphological forms (taʿawwada vs. iʿtāda, internal passives vs. form VII), differences in preposition use, and finally differences in syntactic structure.
The main finding is that the speakers tend to favor structures that are rare in the colloquial register, even if the other options are well attested in classical Arabic. However, in some cases interference from the colloquial form is so strong that speakers appear to be confused as to which form is correct, and when given an additional choice, prefer to avoid problematic forms altogether. In response to at least one question, the majority of speakers preferred to hypercorrect in order to avoid colloquial forms, producing an ungrammatical sentence rather than a colloquial one. The results will also be analyzed in light of demographic data collected regarding level of education, gender and age.
The conclusion discusses what these findings imply about speakers’ knowledge of their language and its linguistic registers, and how they leverage this knowledge when communicating in both writing and speech. Finally, the conclusion discusses what role the avoidance behavior found in this paper plays in maintaining a division between the spoken and written registers, especially the impact these results have on our thinking about the future of the Arabic language and diglossia.
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This paper explores the act of writing the primarily spoken dialects in the orthography of the Ar... more This paper explores the act of writing the primarily spoken dialects in the orthography of the Arabic literary language. The focus of this paper is on Egyptian colloquial Arabic, and its expression in Egyptian written literary works. It attempts to determine the extent that conventions have arisen with respect to writing dialectal words and phrases, and what consequences arise from presence or absence of standardization. In particular, it discusses the ability of authors to manipulate the written form of the colloquial language in order to express distinctions in writing that could not necessarily be expressed in speech. Finally, this paper concludes with a discussion of the extent to which writing in colloquial Arabic is reflective of the writer’s internal linguistic knowledge, and the implication of these results for historical
linguistics and philology.
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Published Papers by Alexander Magidow
Talks & Unpublished Work by Alexander Magidow
In this talk, I will argue that the two morphemes are indeed related, with a breakdown of the case system, attested in the written record, resulting in a reinterpretation of the remaining morpheme, the accusative indefinite marker /-an/, as marking secondary topics (per the framework of Dalrymple and Nikolaeva 2011). However, since this marker could only be used with indefinites, while topics are typically definite, it was further reinterpreted as a marker of incipient topics, that is newly introduced referents that will be topical further on in the discourse (Lambrecht 1994's "brand-new anchored" referents).
Finally, I give a historical overview of the development of this morpheme, from its rise around early Islamic period to its fall in the late medieval-early modern period. The fall, I argue, was likely the result of the loss of the morpheme in major population centers, with an urban-hierarchical pattern of diffusion, probably accelerated by the recasting of the morpheme as a marker of rural identity. Finally, I argue that the modern conception of this feature as being "Bedouin" in nature is a result of the folkloric orientation of studies of Bedouin language, particularly the focus on quantitative metrical poetry which tends to preserve archaic features.
This study takes a discourse analytic approach to determining the conditioning factors which govern the use of case-marking, using both qualitative and quantitative techniques. The corpus of the study consists of approximately 30 minutes of transcribed speech drawn from publicly available unscripted lectures and television broadcasts conducted in formal standard Arabic, with speakers from Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and Lebanon. The approach taken in this study has been to focus on the overlapping and intersecting factors which are implicated in the choice to use case-marking, rather than trying to find a single factor to explain all instances of case-marking.
With regard to previous approaches to case-marking, the quantitative data suggests that speaker proficiency plays a limited role at best. Speakers make mistakes rarely, with only approximately 2% of marked nouns given incorrect case marking. The rules of pause are more difficult to quantify, as speakers never case-marked more than approximately 30% of possible tokens, but a number of examples in the data show that the Quranic rules of pause are generally not followed in either spontaneous speech or even in the
quotation of Quranic verses.
On a qualitative level, the primary finding of this study is that case-marking can be used to mark salience and individuation, such that speakers case-mark those nouns which are highly relevant to the discourse. Building on the individuation hierarchy proposed by Brustad (2000) and Khan (1988) and the concepts of noteworthiness and salience in Ionin (2006), I show that case-marking is often used with highly individuated nominals, but that it is the salience of the nominal, which I view as a constituent property of individuation, that is being marked.
Other factors also appear to play a role in the use of case-marking. There are a number of formulaic idioms and phrases which appear to be memorized with case-marking intact, and therefore have no clear relation to salience, though this study finds that Quranic verses and religious formulae tend to show more flexibility in case-marking than might be expected. Similarly, I show that the register of interaction and speaker style also play a role in how and when case-markings are used.
References
Badawi, S. (1973). mustawayāt al-ʿarabiyya al-muʿāṣira fī miṣr : Registers of Contemporary Arabic
in Egypt. In Arabic. Cairo: Daar Al-Ma’aarif.
Beeston, Alfred F. L. (1970). The Arabic language today. London: Hutchinson.
Brustad, Kristen (2000). The Syntax of Spoken Arabic: a comparative study of Moroccan, Egyptian,
Syrian and Kuwaiti Dialects. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
Holes, Clive (2004). Modern Arabic: Structures, Functions, and Varieties. Washington, D.C.:
Georgetown University Press.
Ionin, Tania (2006). “This is definitely specific: Specificity and Definiteness in Article Systems”.
In: Natural Language Semantics 14, pp. 175{234.
Khan, Geoffrey (1988). Studies in Semitic Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Meiseles, Gustav (1980). “Educated Spoken Arabic and the Arabic language continuum”. In:
Archivum Linguisticum 11.2, pp. 118{148.
Parkinson, Dilworth B. (1994). “Speaking Fusha in Cairo: The Role of the Ending Vowels”. In:
Arabic Sociolinguistics: Issues and Perspectives. Ed. by Yasser Suleiman. Surrey: Curzon.
language in writing fuṣḥā texts that is the subject of this study.
This paper focuses on the results of a multiple choice fill-in-the-blank survey regarding word and structure choice in formal writing which was completed by Syrian native speakers of Arabic (n = 27). Most of the questions in the survey present two or three options, each of which is
present in fuṣḥā but vary in the frequency of their occurrence in the Syrian dialect. A small number of questions present forms which would be considered incorrect in fuṣḥā but which
occur regularly in Syrian colloquial. The structures investigated in the study include words from very different roots (e.g. ḥāsūb vs. kambyūtar), words from the same root but in different inflectional and derivational morphological forms (taʿawwada vs. iʿtāda, internal passives vs. form VII), differences in preposition use, and finally differences in syntactic structure.
The main finding is that the speakers tend to favor structures that are rare in the colloquial register, even if the other options are well attested in classical Arabic. However, in some cases interference from the colloquial form is so strong that speakers appear to be confused as to which form is correct, and when given an additional choice, prefer to avoid problematic forms altogether. In response to at least one question, the majority of speakers preferred to hypercorrect in order to avoid colloquial forms, producing an ungrammatical sentence rather than a colloquial one. The results will also be analyzed in light of demographic data collected regarding level of education, gender and age.
The conclusion discusses what these findings imply about speakers’ knowledge of their language and its linguistic registers, and how they leverage this knowledge when communicating in both writing and speech. Finally, the conclusion discusses what role the avoidance behavior found in this paper plays in maintaining a division between the spoken and written registers, especially the impact these results have on our thinking about the future of the Arabic language and diglossia.
linguistics and philology.
In this talk, I will argue that the two morphemes are indeed related, with a breakdown of the case system, attested in the written record, resulting in a reinterpretation of the remaining morpheme, the accusative indefinite marker /-an/, as marking secondary topics (per the framework of Dalrymple and Nikolaeva 2011). However, since this marker could only be used with indefinites, while topics are typically definite, it was further reinterpreted as a marker of incipient topics, that is newly introduced referents that will be topical further on in the discourse (Lambrecht 1994's "brand-new anchored" referents).
Finally, I give a historical overview of the development of this morpheme, from its rise around early Islamic period to its fall in the late medieval-early modern period. The fall, I argue, was likely the result of the loss of the morpheme in major population centers, with an urban-hierarchical pattern of diffusion, probably accelerated by the recasting of the morpheme as a marker of rural identity. Finally, I argue that the modern conception of this feature as being "Bedouin" in nature is a result of the folkloric orientation of studies of Bedouin language, particularly the focus on quantitative metrical poetry which tends to preserve archaic features.
This study takes a discourse analytic approach to determining the conditioning factors which govern the use of case-marking, using both qualitative and quantitative techniques. The corpus of the study consists of approximately 30 minutes of transcribed speech drawn from publicly available unscripted lectures and television broadcasts conducted in formal standard Arabic, with speakers from Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and Lebanon. The approach taken in this study has been to focus on the overlapping and intersecting factors which are implicated in the choice to use case-marking, rather than trying to find a single factor to explain all instances of case-marking.
With regard to previous approaches to case-marking, the quantitative data suggests that speaker proficiency plays a limited role at best. Speakers make mistakes rarely, with only approximately 2% of marked nouns given incorrect case marking. The rules of pause are more difficult to quantify, as speakers never case-marked more than approximately 30% of possible tokens, but a number of examples in the data show that the Quranic rules of pause are generally not followed in either spontaneous speech or even in the
quotation of Quranic verses.
On a qualitative level, the primary finding of this study is that case-marking can be used to mark salience and individuation, such that speakers case-mark those nouns which are highly relevant to the discourse. Building on the individuation hierarchy proposed by Brustad (2000) and Khan (1988) and the concepts of noteworthiness and salience in Ionin (2006), I show that case-marking is often used with highly individuated nominals, but that it is the salience of the nominal, which I view as a constituent property of individuation, that is being marked.
Other factors also appear to play a role in the use of case-marking. There are a number of formulaic idioms and phrases which appear to be memorized with case-marking intact, and therefore have no clear relation to salience, though this study finds that Quranic verses and religious formulae tend to show more flexibility in case-marking than might be expected. Similarly, I show that the register of interaction and speaker style also play a role in how and when case-markings are used.
References
Badawi, S. (1973). mustawayāt al-ʿarabiyya al-muʿāṣira fī miṣr : Registers of Contemporary Arabic
in Egypt. In Arabic. Cairo: Daar Al-Ma’aarif.
Beeston, Alfred F. L. (1970). The Arabic language today. London: Hutchinson.
Brustad, Kristen (2000). The Syntax of Spoken Arabic: a comparative study of Moroccan, Egyptian,
Syrian and Kuwaiti Dialects. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
Holes, Clive (2004). Modern Arabic: Structures, Functions, and Varieties. Washington, D.C.:
Georgetown University Press.
Ionin, Tania (2006). “This is definitely specific: Specificity and Definiteness in Article Systems”.
In: Natural Language Semantics 14, pp. 175{234.
Khan, Geoffrey (1988). Studies in Semitic Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Meiseles, Gustav (1980). “Educated Spoken Arabic and the Arabic language continuum”. In:
Archivum Linguisticum 11.2, pp. 118{148.
Parkinson, Dilworth B. (1994). “Speaking Fusha in Cairo: The Role of the Ending Vowels”. In:
Arabic Sociolinguistics: Issues and Perspectives. Ed. by Yasser Suleiman. Surrey: Curzon.
language in writing fuṣḥā texts that is the subject of this study.
This paper focuses on the results of a multiple choice fill-in-the-blank survey regarding word and structure choice in formal writing which was completed by Syrian native speakers of Arabic (n = 27). Most of the questions in the survey present two or three options, each of which is
present in fuṣḥā but vary in the frequency of their occurrence in the Syrian dialect. A small number of questions present forms which would be considered incorrect in fuṣḥā but which
occur regularly in Syrian colloquial. The structures investigated in the study include words from very different roots (e.g. ḥāsūb vs. kambyūtar), words from the same root but in different inflectional and derivational morphological forms (taʿawwada vs. iʿtāda, internal passives vs. form VII), differences in preposition use, and finally differences in syntactic structure.
The main finding is that the speakers tend to favor structures that are rare in the colloquial register, even if the other options are well attested in classical Arabic. However, in some cases interference from the colloquial form is so strong that speakers appear to be confused as to which form is correct, and when given an additional choice, prefer to avoid problematic forms altogether. In response to at least one question, the majority of speakers preferred to hypercorrect in order to avoid colloquial forms, producing an ungrammatical sentence rather than a colloquial one. The results will also be analyzed in light of demographic data collected regarding level of education, gender and age.
The conclusion discusses what these findings imply about speakers’ knowledge of their language and its linguistic registers, and how they leverage this knowledge when communicating in both writing and speech. Finally, the conclusion discusses what role the avoidance behavior found in this paper plays in maintaining a division between the spoken and written registers, especially the impact these results have on our thinking about the future of the Arabic language and diglossia.
linguistics and philology.
The primary finding is that the choice between use and non-use of case marking operates as a linguistic system, and that case marking is used primarily to mark highly salient nouns in the discourse. This thesis also finds that this system extends to pragmatics, including register variation and maintainance, as well as politeness strategies. Finally, the study discusses the role that case marking plays in the construction of a speaker's linguistic style. These findings support the theory that syntactically optional elements of speech are often conditioned and meaningful beyond the level of syntax.
The final version of the thesis is available at:
http://hdl.handle.net/2152/ETD-UT-2009-05-130
This website is the public interface to the database, and focuses on allowing for intuitive and controlled data input, and powerful data visualization. Data input relies on contributions from scholars in the field - user contributions are listed prominently on the website so that contributors can receive credit for their work. The interface allows for control over data - not all data must be public, so users may take advantage of the features of the website even for private data that is part of a work in progress.
The database itself is designed around the central concept of the 'language datum', a single piece of linguistic data. Each datum can be any kind of string with meaningful, searchable linguistic information, so in theory the database could hold anything from individual phonemes to idioms. Every datum is marked with a set of tags to allow for easy searching. Each datum is linked to a dialect and to a bibliographic entry, and each datum has permission information and is linked to its contributor. Datums may be in relationships with other datums, with the types of relationships expressed via another set of tags.
This is an open source project under the GPL license. Source code is available via GitHub.
This course has students at the Novice Mid-High level develop a website for a study abroad course in Jordan, learning about the country, culture and how to interact while abroad. It is a complete curriculum for a 13-week college semester with 4 class meetings per week, but it also features suggested material to increase the length of any unit. The majority of the input materials are authentic texts, though there are also materials provided for cultural enrichment in English or subtitled, and some constructed texts. This course is independent of any textbook, but assumes Novice Mid level of Levantine Arabic.