Arabic Language and Linguistics

A common nonsense polymorphism (R577X) in the ACTN3 gene results in complete deficiency of the fast skeletal muscle fiber protein a-actinin-3 in an estimated one billion humans worldwide. The XX null genotype is under-represented in elite sprint athletes, associated with reduced muscle strength and sprint performance in non-athletes, and is over-represented in endurance athletes, suggesting that a-actinin-3 deficiency increases muscle endurance at the cost of power generation. Here we report that muscle from Actn3 knockout mice displays reduced force generation, consistent with results from human association studies. Detailed analysis of knockout mouse muscle reveals reduced fast fiber diameter, increased activity of multiple enzymes in the aerobic metabolic pathway, altered contractile properties, and enhanced recovery from fatigue, suggesting a shift in the properties of fast fibers towards those characteristic of slow fibers. These findings provide the first mechanistic explanation for the reported associations between R577X and human athletic performance and muscle function.

Standard views of morphology in Modern Standard Arabic hold that surface word forms comprise at least two morphemes: a three-consonantal root conveying semantic meaning and
a word pattern carrying syntactic information. An alternative account claims that semantic information is carried by a bi-consonantal morphological unit called the etymon. Accordingly,
in the form [batara] the core meaning is carried not by the tri-consonantal root morpheme {btr} but by the etymon morpheme {b,t} which surfaces in other forms like [batta] 'sever', [batala] 'cut off' with the same meaning 'cutting'. Previous experimental research in Semitic languages has assumed the tri-consonantal root/word pattern approach. In cross-modal and masked priming experiments we ask whether the etymon, as a more fine-grained two-consonantal morphological unit, can yield the morphological priming effects typically obtained with tri-consonantal root morphemes. The results clearly show that two words sharing an etymon do facilitate each other both in cross-modal and masked priming even though they do not share a root, controlling for semantic and for form overlap effects. The bearing of these results on theories of morphological processing and representation is discussed.  2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Intercultural relations scholars have recently focused on investigating the impact of the news coverage and the media on society in general. However, although social media have become a valuable resource for mining opinions, there are no previous studies investigating the Arab image sentiments expressed on social media. This study fills this gap through the analysis of a random sample of 26,905 tweets dealing with the Arab image in Spanish tweets. To conduct the analysis, an expert predefined lexicon of around 6,800 seed adjectives was used.
Descriptive analysis detected a generally positive sentiment towards the Arab image while partitioning around medoids (PAM) clustering suggested that it is possible to cluster the tweets into four distinct clusters. Thus, it seems that the Arab image represents a complex construction. By analysing opinions expressed on social media towards the Arab image, this research adds breadth and depth to the debate
over such an under-represented area.

The Semitic languages have enjoyed a long tradition of linguistic study, and remain one of the most widely studied of the world's language families. The large amount of scholarship that is generated on both the ancient and modern languages continues to have an effect on our understanding of the internal subgrouping of the Semitic family. Unfortunately, for both the specialist and non-specialist, reliable and up-to-date treatments of this topic are not easily found. This article will survey the current views on Semitic subgrouping and highlight recent scholarship on the issue.

Perceptions of happy facial affect from asymmetric composite faces presented in free vision were compared in four groups: left-to-right readers (Hindi), right-to-left readers (Arabic), left-to-right and right-to-left readers (Hindi/Urdu) and illiterates (Hindi/Urdu). Right - and left-handed users of Hindi and Urdu were studied. The analysis of asymmetry scores revealed a significant effect of Group, such that a left hemifield preference was present only in the left-to-right (Hindi) group. There were no reliable differences between right- and left-handers. Furthermore, the leftward bias was present in a significantly larger proportion of Hindi than Urdu or Arabic readers. These results are taken to reflect an interaction between a cerebral laterality effect and a directional scanning effect in facial affect judgment.

Yabancı dil öğrenmek, ciddi çabalar gerektiren karmaşık bir süreçtir. Zira pek çok unsur bu sürecin bir parçası olabilir. Bunlardan biri de sözcük öğrenme ve sözcük bilgisidir. Geçmişten günümüze, sözcüklerin ezberlenmesi ve bellekte saklanması amacıyla birçok strateji geliştirilmiş ve uygulanmıştır. Her dilin kendine özgü yapısı sebebiyle yeni sözcük öğrenme stratejileri geliştirilebilir. Özellikle anadili Türkçe olup hedef dil olarak Arapça öğrenen kitle için sözcük öğrenmede ciddi kolaylıklar mevcuttur. Günümüz Türkçesinde de aslı Arapça olan pek çok sözcük yaygın şekilde kullanılmaktadır. İki dil arasındaki bu denli yakınlık dil öğrenmede değerlendirilecek bir fırsat niteliğindedir. Özellikle ana dili Türkçe olup Arapça öğrenmeye başlayan/dil yeterliliği başlangıç seviyesinde olan kimselerin güdülenmelerini olumlu yönde artıracak bu strateji, Arapça öğrenme sürecini daha uzun ve sağlıklı bir zemine oturtabilecektir. Elinizdeki çalışma, Arapça ve Türkçenin sözcük yapısı ve sözcük öğrenme stratejilerinin keyfiyetini ortaya koymak amacıyla yapılmaktadır. Böylece anadili Türkçe olup Arapçayı yabancı bir dil olarak öğrenenler, Arapça sözcükleri daha kolay bir şekilde anlayıp öğrenebilecektir.
Learning a foreign language is complex process that requires serious efforts. Many elements can be part of this process. At the beginning of these elements comes word learning and vocabulary. From past to present, many strategies have been developed in order to memorize a word. Systematic new vocabulary learning strategies can be developed for each language because of its unique structure. Especially there are great facilities for the target group who learn Arabic as the target language and their native language is Turkish. The origin of many Turkish words are etymologically based Arabic language. This closeness between the two languages has the potential to provide serious unmissable opportunities for language learning. This strategy, which will increase the motivation of those whose mother tongue is Turkish and who is learning Arabic, or whose language proficiency is at the beginning level, will make the Arabic learning process longer and healthier. This work is done in order to reveal the structure of Arabic and Turkish word structure and the possibility of word learning strategies. By this means, those who speak Arabic as a foreign

The complex and cross-linguistically uncommon phonological phenomenon of "emphasis" is best known from Central Semitic languages such as Arabic and Aramaic. It is, however, found to varying degrees in a number of non-Semitic languages in contact with Arabic. This paper describes how in Kumzari, an Indo-European language spoken around the Strait of Hormuz, uvular-pharyngeal emphasis has arisen through language contact and has proliferated through language-internal processes. Beginning with the retention of emphatic consonants in a direct, extensive lexification by Arabic dating back at least 1300 years, emphasis has progressively penetrated the language by means of lexical innovations and two types of sound changes in both borrowed and inherited vocabulary: (i) analogical spread of emphasis onto plain but potentially emphatic consonants; and (ii) a sound change in which z has been invariably recast as an emphatic ẓ with no plain counterpart. The role of the back consonants w, x, q and ḥ, which induce emphasis on potentially emphatic consonants in diachronic processes but not synchronically, highlights the unique way in which this complex phenomenon operates in one non-Semitic language in contact with Arabic.

‘Arabrew’ denotes a mixture of the languages that index two nations known for their seemingly intractable conflict. It is supposedly spoken by Palestinians and other Arabs who are citizens of Israel. Evidence from the field gathered in 2015 shows some codeswitching, especially inter-sentential, and borrowing, mostly of nouns for specialist terminology, and of a few discourse markers. This does not support the claim that a new variety has emerged, yet the debate around it channels concerns about nonlinguistic issues relating to the political economy of Israel and to anxieties about Israeli-Palestinian relations. This debate invokes ideologies, including language ideologies, of nationalism,
colonialism, liberalism, and more, that are identifiably linked to the
historical and material contexts. The study uses critical discourse analysis and contact linguistics to outline the articulation between distinctions of national identity, socioeconomic class, the way people speak, and the way this speech is ideologically received.

Directional response biases due to a conceptual link between space and number, such as a left-to-right hand bias for increasing numerical magnitude, are known as the SNARC (Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes) effect. We investigated how the SNARC effect for numerosities would be influenced by reading-writing direction, task instructions, and ambient visual environment in four literate populations exemplifying opposite readingwriting cultures-namely, Arabic (right-to-left script) and English (left-to-right script). Monoliterates and biliterates in Jordan and the U.S. completed a speeded numerosity comparison task to assess the directionality and magnitude of a SNARC effect in their numerosity processing. Monoliterates' results replicated previously documented effects of reading-writing direction and task instructions: the SNARC effect found in left-to-right readers was weakened in right-to-left readers, and the left-to-right group exhibited a task-dependency effect (SNARC effect in the smaller condition, reverse SNARC effect in the larger condition). Biliterates' results did not show a clear effect of environment; instead, both biliterate groups resembled English monoliterates in showing a left-to-right, task-dependent SNARC effect, albeit weaker than English monoliterates'. The absence of significant biases in all Arabicreading groups (biliterates and Arabic monoliterates) points to a potential conflict between distinct spatial-numerical mapping codes. This view is explained in terms of the proposed Multiple Competing Codes Theory (MCCT), which posits three distinct spatial-numerical mapping codes (innate, cardinal, ordinal) during numerical processing-each involved at varying levels depending on individual and task factors.

The computational treatment of subjectivity and sentiment in natural language is usually significantly improved by applying features exploiting lexical resources where entries are tagged with semantic orientation (e.g., positive, negative values). In spite of the fair amount of work on Arabic sentiment analysis over the past few years, e.g., (Abbasi et al., 2008; Abdul-Mageed et al., 2014; Abdul-Mageed et al., 2012; Abdul-Mageed and Diab, 2012a; Abdul-Mageed and Diab, 2012b; Abdul-Mageed et al., 2011a; Abdul-Mageed and Diab, 2011), the language remains under-resourced as to these polarity repositories compared to the English language. In this paper, we report efforts to build and present SANA, a large-scale, multi-genre, multi-dialect multi-lingual lexicon for the subjectivity and sentiment analysis of the Arabic language and dialects.

Given its abundance of dialects, varieties, styles and registers, Arabic lends itself easily to the study of language variation and change. It is spoken by some 300 million people in an area spanning roughly from northwest Africa to the Persian Gulf. Traditional Arabic dialectology has dealt predominantly with geographical variation. However, in recent years, more nuanced studies of inter- and intra-speaker variation have seen the light of day. In some respects, Arabic sociolinguistics is still lagging behind the field compared to variationist studies in English and other Western languages. On the other hand, the insight presented in studies of Arabic can and should be considered in the course of shaping a crosslinguistic sociolinguistic theory. Variationist studies of Arabic speech communities began almost two decades after Labov’s pioneering studies of American English and have flourished following the turn of the twenty-first century. These studies have sparked debates between more quantitatively inclined sociolinguists and those who value qualitative analysis. In reality, virtually no sociolinguistic study of Arabic that includes statistical modeling is free of qualitative insights. They are also not flawless and not always cutting-edge methodologically or theoretically. But the field in moving in a positive direction, which will likely lead to the recognition of its significance to sociolinguistics at-large.

The Modern Arabic Literary Language is a thoughtful examination of the changes that the Arabic language has undergone in its transition from its roots in classical Arabic to a language able to meet the demands of twentieth-century life.

In this volume a respected and masterful scholar of the Arabic language Jaroslav Stetkevych notes the ways that new words have been incorporated into the language, ranging from deriving new terms from existing roots (for example, the word for "newspaper" derives from the word meaning "sheet to write on") to downright assimilation of foreign words. Also noting the changes in grammar and semantics, Stetkevych illustrates how literary Arabic has become a more flexible language. Originally published in 1970, this volume is a clear assessment of lexical and stylistic developments in Modern Literary Arabic.

This classic book is an important resource for scholars and advanced students of Arabic language and linguistics who wish to study the complexities of language change and lexical expansion.

We update our understanding of the view that grammar regulates inter-segmental temporal coordination and present an extension of that view to a new do-Morocco 2 Gafos et al. main: we argue that inter-segmental coordination is basic to prosody. It is the glue joining segments together differently in different languages (here, illustrated with examples from Arabic and Spanish) and orchestrates their unfolding in ways corresponding to constructs posited in theoretical analysis. The correspondence is one between organization in mind-brain and organization in vocal tract. Moreover, for both mind-brain and vocal tract, the organization is phonological and abstract. It is so because it holds over segments of various identities: in Arabic, the first segment in /bka/ is not prosodified as part of the same unit as /ka/ and this holds true also for /blat/, /klat/ and so on, regardless of sonority. In contrast, in English or Spanish, a different organization holds. Crucially, uniformity in organization (same organization presiding over sequences with varying segmental makeup) does not imply uniqueness of phonetic exponents: prosodic organization is pleiotropic, simultaneously expressed by more than one phonetic exponent. Finally, two properties of coordination relations are underscored: lawful flexibility and abstractness. The first is revealed in the degrees of freedom with which movements corresponding to any given effector begin ; the second in invariances of task-relevant kinematic signatures regardless of the effectors implicated in any given segmental sequence. Once again, abstract phono-logical structure is mirrored in vocal tracts via coordination relations holding across physiology and the particular modes of its operation.

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: Second language researchers have focused increasingly in recent years on "heritage language learners," or adult learners who wish to learn, relearn, or improve their linguistic proficiency in a family language they spoke while growing up. The present study examines this domain with a particular focus on Arabic. Design/Methodology/Approach: We present in this paper a "scoping review" that systematically examines the theoretical approaches, methods, contexts, instruments, and linguistic foci found in empirical research on Arabic heritage language learning and learners. Following a comprehensive search, 34 empirical studies (27 journal articles and seven dissertations/theses) were identified that met our criteria. Data and Analysis: Each study was coded for the samples, designs, theoretical approaches, data collection instruments, and a number of other substantive and methodological features and practices. Frequencies and percentages of study features were then calculated. Findings/Conclusions: Among other results, the study revealed a variety of approaches to defining heritage learners/learning. Although studies in this domain most often employed cross-sectional designs and interviews to collect data, a variety of theoretical approaches both socially and cognitively oriented can be found. Originality: This study presents the first attempt to apply synthetic research techniques to the growing body of research on heritage language learning/learners. Significance/Implications: Our results describe this growing domain, identifying current trends and potentially fruitful directions for future research.

Aims: This study focuses on heritage speakers' ability to use their Arabic varieties and English in the construction of narratives of personal experience. This is critical because English, Colloquial Arabic (CA), and Standard Arabic (SA) are part of the sociolinguistic reality of the families and communities in which many heritage Arabic speakers live. Design: The study compares and contrastes heritage speakers' Arabic and English narratives with respect to codes, registers, and functions in the narratives. Data and analysis: Fifteen Arabic and 15 English narratives from five participants, fluent in Arabic and English, were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. Findings: The results reveal that, despite their fluency in their heritage language, respondents lack the sociolinguistic competence to socially and pragmatically deploy CA and SA appropriately in their narratives. In the Arabic narratives, respondents alternated frequently between CA and SA, but they were not always able to maintain the asymmetrical functions of CA and SA. English was used mainly as a compensation strategy, yet participants were able to integrate contextually appropriate English registers in discourse. In the English narratives, participants switched parsimoniously to Arabic for fillers and culturally specific terms and expressions. Moreover, they displayed a greater register control based on the events in their narratives. Originality: This is one of few studies focusing on the sociolinguistic competence of heritage Arabic speakers. It is the first study to examine the distribution and functions of Arabic varieties and English in personal narratives rendered in Arabic and English. Implications: The study indicates that a full understanding of heritage language acquisition requires an evaluation of the sociolinguistic aspects of language use. Heritage speakers are influenced by contextual factors and by the lack of a community of practice, elements that are key in understanding their sociolinguistic competence.

Of course, languages are not in contact. We could say that speakers of languages are, but even this would be misleading, as we would bestow an undue role to individuals in their capacity as speakers, and at the same time forget that words and patterns spread when they are heard, rather than when they are uttered. As Thomason (2001: p. 2) puts it, "in the simplest definition, language contact is the use of more than one language in the same place at the same time". Thus, what we call language contact is one facet of human interaction, never separable from it. An obvious factor favoring language contact is widespread bi-and multilingualism. However, chances of language contact might be increased/decreased among other things, by the relative number of speakers of a given language, their geographical location, their movement opportunities, and the technologies they use in communication -all the way down to the individual disposition to contact. Still, in any case, individuals interact, either face to face or not. In this respect, it is also important to remark that when we call an individual "a speaker of [language] X" we qualify them on the basis of their verbal behavior only -leading us eventually to forget that language interaction is ultimately just one of the results of human interaction (verbal and non-verbal alike).

The goal of this study is to provide cross-linguistic data on the acquisition of phonetic complexity among children acquiring four different languages: Tunisian Arabic, Tashlhiyt Berber, English, and French. Using an adaptation of Jakielski’s (2000) Index of Phonetic Complexity (IPC), we carried out an analysis to assess phonetic complexity of children’s early vocabulary in the four languages. Four different samples from each language were analyzed: 50 words selected from an adult dictionary of each language, 50 words from child-directed speech, 50 words targeted by the child, and the child’s actual pronunciations of those 50 words. Globally, we hypothesized that children’s early productions would be shaped by universal articulatory constraints, but also by the language they are exposed to, depending on its phonological complexity. Our findings show that Arabic displays higher degrees of complexity compared to Berber, English and French, and that children acquiring Arabic target and produce more complex words than children learning Berber, English and French.

The noun plural system in Modern Standard Arabic lies at a nexus of critical issues in morphological learnability. The suffixing “sound” plural competes with as many as 31 non-concatenative “broken” plural patterns. Our computational analysis of singular–plural pairs in the Corpus of Contemporary Arabic explores what types of linguistic information are statistically relevant to morphological generalisation for this highly complex system. We show that an analogical approach with the generalised context model is highly successful in predicting the plural form for any given singular form. This model proves to be robust to variation, as evidenced by its stability across 10 rounds of cross-validation. The predictive power is carried almost entirely by the CV template, a representation which specifies a segment's status as a consonant or vowel only, providing further support for the abstraction of prosodic templates in the Arabic morphological system as proposed by McCarthy and Prince.

Updating the methodology of Hayward (1991), using the concept of colexification (François 2008), this paper, for the first time, provides quantitative evidence that the languages of the West African Sahel/Savanna form a lexical-typological language area characterised by shared colexifications absent further north.  It then uses the linguistic comparative method to determine how languages entering or leaving this area, or coming into increasing contact with it at its edges, have converged with their new neighbours within the past millennium.  The results indicate sharp differences in the respective roles and rates of borrowing and calquing, with the latter acting almost exclusively to increase shared colexifications.

(Erratum: Denis Creissels assures me that Bambara jíri can mean “tree” and “wood”, but never “firewood”; please correct accordingly.)

Multilingual learning and teaching have been receiving growing attention of late as many cities and states undergo significant demographic changes brought about by increasing levels of human migration. The onset of super‐diversity means that teachers often encounter students with very different language and cultural backgrounds in the classroom. This has created a new set of challenges and opportunities, especially concerning the teaching and learning of languages. As a result, research on language teaching and learning in super‐diverse contexts has acquired greater importance, yet the teaching of languages other than English (LOTE), specifically LOTE teacher beliefs and practices, has received comparatively little attention to date. To shed more light on teacher beliefs and practices as these concern the teaching of LOTEs to multilingual students, this study explored the extent to which 100 Arabic language teachers, working in UK‐curriculum secondary schools in the United Arab Emirates, used their students’ multilingualism as a resource during lessons and developed their self‐regulation and language awareness through specific activities. The findings regarding the participants’ efforts to develop their students’ self‐regulation and language awareness revealed an unexpected, negative correlation between their degree of multilingualism and their reported practices.

The plural system of Mubi (East Chadic, Afroasiatic) stands out cross-linguistically within Chadic and worldwide for its extensive use of pattern morphology, fixing the output’s vowel qualities and shape while preserving the input’s consonants. This paper demonstrates that, while some elements of this system may be conserved from earlier stages of Afroasiatic, others reflect the influence of Chadian Arabic, the regional lingua franca. The process of influence, however, turns out to involve not just straightforward pattern morpheme borrowing (exemplified here by the iambic pattern BaCaaDiFe), but also the reshaping of inherited patterns. The most frequent quadriliteral plural pattern, BuCooDuF, reflects Arabic influence in its shape – mediated by a change in mapping directionality – but Chadic inheritance in its distribution. This result supports the hypothesis that pattern morphology is more easily transferred between related languages.

The main aim of this study is to introduce a model of TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) annotation of Hebrew elements in Judeo-Arabic texts, i.e., code switching (CS), borrowing, and Hebrew quotations. This article will provide an introduction to using XML (Extensible Markup Language) to investigate sociolinguistic aspects in medieval Judeo-Arabic texts. Accordingly, it will suggest to what extent using XML is useful for investigating linguistic and sociolinguistic features in the Judeo-Arabic paradigm. To provide an example for how XML annotation could be applied to Judeo-Arabic texts, a corpus of 300 pages selected from three Judeo-Arabic books has been manually annotated using the TEI P5. The annotation covers all instances of CS, borrowing, and Hebrew quotations in that corpus.

This ethnographic study focuses on the ways whereby gender roles associated with male and female Qatari students in intercultural communication courses in a university in Qatar are negotiated between them and their two female instructors from the US and Greece. Our aim is to contribute towards the development of good practices related to teaching "exchange of information between members who are unalike culturally" (Berry et al., 2011, p. 471) by arguing that an efficient way of overcoming misunderstandings between instructors and students is to engage in a pedagogical approach, which we call "dialogical infotainment", and which serves the ultimate goal of sharing various types of power in order to sharpen our cultural sensitivity and subsequent tolerance and respect for each other's gender role-related peculiarities.

In recent work, idioms have in many traditions been assimilated to the study of metaphor. An idiom such as 'spill the beans' is understood against the conceptual metaphors, THE MIND IS A CONTAINER and IDEAS ARE ENTITIES for instance. Such a treatment implies that idioms are processed online, calling up in their production the conceptual metaphors which support them. In this article an alternative treatment is put forward whereby idioms are lexical in nature. The argument has two parts. First, the constituent collocates of idioms share a number of key grammatical properties with non-idiomatic lexemes. Even in their idiomatic usage they must in some sense be normal lexemes. Secondly, at the same time, idioms are shown to be distinctive in terms of their discourse properties, in particular the fact of idiomaticity restricting the referentiality of idiomatic nouns. Drawing broadly on ideas developed within psycholinguistic treatments of idiomaticity, a model of idioms is developed whereby idioms are seen as lexically compositional against a rich polysemy of their stipulated, constituent lexemes. While, it may be inferred, metonymic and meta-phoric associations led to the lexical polysemy of the constituent collocates, metonymy and metaphor play no necessary role in their online production and processing. The argument is developed on the basis of a detailed discussion of idioms in Nigerian Arabic. The data derives from a large, oral corpus (400,000 words), in which the conventional nature of idiomaticity is underscored by the quantitative preponderance of idiomatic meanings among basic body part nouns such as ṛaas 'head' and gaḷb 'heart'.

Although identical on the spoken level, Hindi and Urdu differ markedly on the written level in terms of reading/writing direction and orthographic depth, with discernible processing consequences. The present study used a divided field paradigm to study the impact of writing system characteristics of Hindi and Urdu on word naming latencies in skilled biliterate users of these languages. Hindi (read/written from left to right) was hypothesized to show a larger right field advantage than Urdu (read/written from right to left); Hindi words sharing form overlap with primes were expected to show a significant priming effect in the left visual field, but a significant right field effect for morphologically-primed naming. Both these expectations were confirmed. An overall right field advantage was obtained for one syllable Hindi and Urdu words; two syllable Urdu words showed either no visual field differences or a left field advantage, and the right field advantage for Hindi was significantly greater for two syllable than one syllable words. Further, Hindi words showed significant form priming (relative to control stimuli) in the left visual field and significant morphological priming (relative to form priming) in the right visual field. By contrast, Urdu words showed no significant form priming in either visual field, and significantly greater morphological than form priming in the left visual field. These results are taken to suggest that visual field asymmetries in word naming are sensitive to differences in reading habit-related scanning biases and to orthographic depth-related differences in word recognition processes.

Many varieties of Arabic and Berber have undergone a process of syntactic change known as Jespersen’s Cycle (JC). In JC a postverbal item is reanalysed as part of a discontinuous marker of negation together with the original preverbal negator. In some cases the original preverbal negator is then lost. This paper investigates the synchronic and historical data relevant to JC in the varieties in question, arguing that the innovation of the postverbal negator began in Arabic and later spread to Berber through contact. The various syntactic reanalyses involved in the Arabic JC are sketched, and the implications of the Arabic and Berber data for better-known instances of JC in European languages are discussed.

This article examines how Moroccan language teachers perceive good teaching practice. References to learner-centeredness factor prominently these perceptions, paralleling the policy discourse of the Moroccan government. Language teachers report a varied field of good practice, wherein teachers of English uniquely benefit from patterns of professional development funding, pedagogical research, and symbolic capital. This analysis suggests that discussions of language pedagogy in Morocco cannot be clearly separated from the politics of language. Engaging with literature on the contingent nature of pedagogical knowledge, this article emphasizes the importance of considering pedagogical politics through local frames in addition to global ones

In the late 1950s, Iraqi Jews were either forced or chose to leave Iraq for Israel. Most Iraqi Jewish authors found it impossible to continue writing in Arabic in Israel and so faced the literary challenge of switching to Hebrew. As bilinguals, Iraqi Jewish novelists have employed Arabic in some of their Hebrew literary works, including strategies of code-switching. Conversational code-switching is traditionally divided into three types: intersentential code-switching, intrasentential code-switching, and tag-switching. Although code-switching in literary texts has its distinct features, research on written code-switching generally follows the typology applied to conversational code-switching. This article focuses on the typology of code-switching in literary texts. It investigates Arabic codes used in three Hebrew novels written by Iraqi Jewish novelists. The article suggests three main types of literary code-switching in view of the mutual relationship between author, text, and reader: Hard-Access, Easy-Access, and Ambiguous Access code-switching.

I attempt to explain the origins of the many personal and place names of apparent Arabic origin that appear in the Duero basin in Northern Spain and Portugal. The abundance of such names is surprising in a region which seems only to have been briefly under direct Andalusi control, and the three different hypotheses that have sought to explain the phenomenon will be studied in turn. The first hypothesis considered is that the names are the result of migration of persecuted Christians from al-Andalus towards the North during the ninth and tenth centuries. Although such migration seems to have taken place, I argue against it being responsible for the names that interest us. The second hypothesis is that of acculturation from across the Andalusi border. Again there seems to be some validity for this as an explanation for many descriptive place names to be found in the southern extremes of the region, but again this solution fails to explain the abundance of Arabic names further north. I conclude that the northernmost concentrations of Arabic names in fact have their origins in the eighth-century conquest and settlement of the area by Romance-speaking north-Africans and the early conversion of a significant part of the autochthonous population.

Morphologically marked case is in Arabic a feature exclusive to the variety of Stand- ard Arabic, with no parallel in the spoken varieties, and it is orthographically marked only on some word classes in specific grammatical situations. In this study we test the hypothesis that readers of Arabic do not parse sentences for case and that orthographically marked case can therefore be removed with no effect on reading. Twenty-nine participants read sentences in which one of the two most frequent types of orthographically marked case was either retained or omitted, while their eye- movements were monitored. The removal of case marking from subjects in the sound masculine plural declension (changing the suffix-ūn ـون to -īn ـين) had no neg- ative effect on gaze duration, regressions out, or go-past time. The removal of case marking form direct objects in the triptote declension (omitting the suffix -an ًـا) did however resulted in an increase in these measures. These results indicate that only some forms of case marking are required in the grammar used by readers for parsing written text.

Arab political discourse has vastly changed since the nineteenth century and with the turn of the century and the rise of political nationalism. Much change has Arabic witnessed during these two centuries as manifested in the sort of language used in everyday or average Arab territory.

Abstract

Heritage language acquisition has been characterized by various asymmetries, including the differential acquisition rates of various linguistic areas and the unbalanced acquisition of different categories within a single area. This paper examines Arabic heritage speakers’ knowledge of subject–verb agreement versus noun–adjective agreement with the aim of contrasting their distributions and exploring areas of resilience and vulnerability within Arabic heritage speech and their theoretical implications. Two oral-production experiments were carried out, one involving two picture-description tasks, and another requiring an elicited narrative. The results of the study show that subject–verb agreement morphology is more maintained than noun–adjective morphology. Moreover, the unmarked singular masculine default is more robust than the other categories in both domains and is often over-generalized to other marked categories. The results thus confirm the existence of these asymmetries. We propose that these asymmetries may not be explained by a single factor, but by a complex set of morphological, syntactic, semantic, and frequency-related factors.

Mu‘reb kelimelerin sonlarındaki hareke, harf ve hazif türündeki i‘râb göstergeleri dilcilerin çoğunluğuna göre anlamın karinesidir. Bir başka deyişle kelime sonlarında bulunan i‘râb göstergeleri genel kabule göre, o kelimenin cümle içindeki konumunun anlaşılmasına yardımcı olmaktadır. Kelimenin cümle içindeki konumların bilinmesi ise cümlenin doğru biçimde anlaşılmasını sağlamaktadır. Her ne kadar kelime sonlarındaki i‘râb göstergelerinin kelimelerin cümle içindeki konumuyla bir ilgisi olmayıp sadece kelimeler arası geçişi kolaylaştırmak amacına matuf olduğunu söyleyenler olsa da çoğunluk tarafından bu görüş kabul görmemiştir. Bu nedenle makalede nahiv âlimleriyle müfessirlerdeki hâkim tavır çerçevesinde i‘râb-anlam incelemesi yapılmıştır. Dilcilerin çoğunluğu i‘râbın anlamın bir göstergesi olduğunu kabul ederler. Bu nedenle tefsirlerde sıkça yer alan i‘râb açıklamaları âyetlerdeki cümlelerin daha doğru anlaşılması amacına yöneliktir. Ebü'l-Esved ed-Düelî'nin Kur’ân’ın belli başlı kelimelerine harekeler koyması da Kur’ân’ın doğru biçimde okunup yanlış harekenin yanlış anlama yol açmasına engel olmasıyla ilgilidir. Bu nedenle i‘râb-anlam arasındaki sıkı ilişki nahiv kitaplarında açık bir şekilde vurgulanmaktadır. Her ne kadar i‘râbın anlamın bir anahtarı olduğu belirtilse de bu durumun her zaman geçerli olmadığı görülmektedir. Çünkü bazen kelime sonlarındaki i‘râb göstergeleri ile anlam arasında bir uyuşmazlık görülmektedir. Böyle durumlar nahivciler tarafından kurbu’l-civâr olarak değerlendirilmektedir. Buna göre bir kelime cümle içindeki konumuna göre i‘râb göstergesi almayıp kendinden önceki kelimeyle uyum içinde olması için aynı i‘râb göstergesi almaktadır. Bunun amacı ise anlamdan ziyade cümlenin fonetik akışının bozulmamasıdır. Bu fonetik uyum sadece kelime sonlarındaki i‘râb göstergesiyle sınırlı da değildir. Bir kelimenin kendi içindeki uyumunun sağlanması adına söz konusu kelimenin sarfî yapısında da değişiklik yapılabilmektedir. Bu durum sarf ve nahiv kuralına aykırılığına rağmen Arapların hem kelime içi hem de kelimeler arası harekelerinin uyumuna önem vermesinden kaynaklanmaktadır. Nitekim bu tarz bir okuyuş hem telaffuz kolaylığı hem de muhatap açısından bir insicam hissi sağlamaktadır. İşte bu makale Kur’ân âyetlerinde i‘râb göstergelerinin her zaman anlamı ortaya koyan bir karine olmadığı iddiasını taşımaktadır. Bu iddianın temel gerekçesi Arap kelâmındaki mevcut kullanımda olduğu gibi Kur’ân âyetlerinde fonetik uyum için anlama aykırı i‘râb göstergelerinin bulunmasıdır. Bu durum edebî özellikler açısından anlama ilişkin edebî sanatlar yanında fonetiğe ilişkin sanatların da Kur’ân’ın önemli hususlarından biri olduğunu göstermektedir. Nahivde kurbu’l-civâr diye ifade edilen bu özelliğin bulunduğu âyetler konusunda müfessirlerin yaklaşımları birbirinden farklılık arz etmektedir. Bu farklı yaklaşımların temelinde müfessirlerin dikkate aldıkları ilgili rivâyetler, nahiv ekolü vb. hususlar yer almaktadır. Anlam karışıklığı olmaması durumunda yerleşik nahiv kuralına aykırı durumların kullanımına müsamahalı yaklaşılmaktadır. Bu nedenle i‘râb-ı nahvîye aykırı olduğu halde anlam belirsizliği olmaması durumunda kurbu’l-civâr kullanılmaktadır. Kurbu’l-civârı salt bir kullanım kabul edip şâz gören Basralı nahivcilerin aksine Kûfeli nahivciler ise meseleyi kıyâsî bir nahiv kuralı haline getirip şart edatların cevap cümlelerinin meczûmluğunu buna bina etmişlerdir. Hem Arap dilinde hem de Kur’ân âyetlerinde kurbu’l-civâr nahivcilerin çoğunluğu tarafından bir kullanım olarak kabul görse de kullanım yeri açısından görüş ayrılıkları bulunmaktadır. Erken dönem nahivciler arasında bu konuya dair bir netlik bulunmazken geç dönem nahivcilerin geneline göre kurbu’l-civâr meselesi sıfat-mevsûf, te’kit-müekked minh ve atf-ı beyan konumlarına mahsustur. Ancak kurbu’l-civârın atıfta olup olamayacağı meselesi ise tartışmalıdır. Tartışmaların ortaya çıktığı ilk dönemlerde atıfta kurbu’l-civâr genellikle kabul görmezken sonraki dönemlerde daha yaygın bir şekilde kabul görmeye başlamıştır. Bu makalede metot olarak klasik temel nahiv kaynaklarından yararlanılarak konunun teorik çerçevesi ortaya konulmuştur. Ortaya konulan teorik çerçeveye göre ilk dönemden günümüze kadar belli başlı öne çıkan tefsir kaynaklarında kurbu’l-civâra konu olan âyetler hakkındaki tartışmalar analitik bakış açısıyla ele alınmıştır.

This paper publishes two short Nabataean graffiti discovered in
2015 by the team of the OCIANA project at Tell al-ʿAbd and
Marabb al-Shurafāʾ, in the H arrah desert, north-eastern Jordan.
Despite their brevity, these new texts appear of interest because
the H arrah is an area well outside that in which Nabataean
inscriptions are normally found, bringing to twelve the number of
known texts from that region, taking the Namārah epitaph into
account. Consisting exclusively of onomastica, they contain some
personal names already known among the settled and nomadic
communities of southern Syria and northern Jordan as well as
some new anthroponyms in the Nabataean onomasticon, notably
šmʿn, that may correspond to the Arab name Samʿān.