Linguistic argumentation and logic: An alternative method approach in Arabic grammar

Rozprawa podkreśla związek między językową argumentacją a logiką. Argumentacja językowa jest systemem językowym, który stosuje znaczenie wyrażeń ujętych w zdania do zarysowania pełnego znaczenia zdań, w nich bowiem konstytuują się zależności między wyrażeniami. Rzeczywiście, to powiązanie między wyrażeniami wzmacnia całościowe znaczenie począwszy od samych podstaw struktury zdania w logicznym powiązaniu idei. W nim znajduje się relacja między słowami a umysłem, zależna od logiki powiązanych ze sobą wypowiedzi. Aby podkreślić znaczenie przedstawionego wyżej sposobu myślenia, autorka zwraca się ku teorii wczesnej gramatyki arabskiej, ogniskującej się raczej wokół analogii niż anomalii. Nastawienie w systemie na analogię opiera się na podstawowej teorii, która implikuje wspomnianą wyżej relację, choć niektóre współczesne ujęcia odrzucają tę interpretację. W podsumowaniu swojej analizy, autorka uwzględnia podobne teorie gramatyki łacińskiej, które wykazują nastawienie logiczne, będące następstwem powiązania językowej argumentacji z logiką. Konkludując, autorka stwierdza, iż powiązanie słów i logiki okazuje się pojęciem uniwersalnym

Towards Understanding Egyptian Arabic Dialogues

Labelling of user's utterances to understanding his attends which called Dialogue Act (DA) classification, it is considered the key player for dialogue language understanding layer in automatic dialogue systems. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to user's utterances labeling for Egyptian spontaneous dialogues and Instant Messages using Machine Learning (ML) approach without relying on any special lexicons, cues, or rules. Due to the lack of Egyptian dialect dialogue corpus, the system evaluated by multi-genre corpus includes 4725 utterances for three domains, which are collected and annotated manually from Egyptian call-centers. The system achieves F1 scores of 70. 36% overall domains.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1505.0308

The Agent Intellect as “form for us” and Averroes’s Critique of al-Fârâbî

This article explicates Averroes\u27s understanding of human knowing and abstraction in this three commentaries on Aristotle\u27s De Anima. While Averroes\u27s views on the nature of the human material intellect changes through the three commentaries until he reaches is famous view of the unity of the material intellect as one for all human beings, his view of the agent intellect as \u27form for us\u27 is sustained throughout these works. In his Long Commentary on the De Anima he reveals his dependence on al-Fârâbî for this notion and provides a detailed critique of the Farabian notion that the agent intellect is \u27form for us\u27 only as agent cause, not as our true formal cause. Although Averroes argues that the agent intellect must somehow be intrinsic to us as our form since humans are per se rational and undertake acts of knowing by will, his view is shown to rest on an equivocal use of the notion of formal cause. The agent intellect cannot be properly our intrinsic formal principle while remaining ontologically separate

The Semantics of Article Acquisition

Accurately using articles has consistently been a difficult task for English language learners as articles are often treated as solely grammatical forms rather than also recognizing as representatives of complex semantic properties. This paper aims to synthesize individual research on semantic factors which influence article acquisition and explore how they interact with each other. This paper especially focuses on how native and second language speakers of English acquire and understand the concepts of definiteness and specificity and explores these features within the framework of Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar. This paper examines the Fluctuating Hypothesis (FH) and its use as a theoretical framework for a variety of modern article acquisition research. The theory states that ELLs have access to Universal Grammar when discovering the parameters for the semantic categories of definiteness and specificity. This paper then explains the interaction between the FH and transfer in language learners from both article-based and articleless language backgrounds, concluding that transfer does not override the effects of the FH. Additional semantic factors such as countability, plurality, and idiomatic phrase structures are also discussed in this paper, emphasizing the many complex layers ELLs must learn to navigate. This paper examines recent attempts to create linguistically informed article instruction, some of which incorporate concepts from the FH. Finally, the paper provides guidelines for English language instructors, stressing the importance of understanding features of their students’ native language, building students’ awareness of the complexities associated with article use, and correcting their misconceptions of specificity and definiteness

Averroes: Religious Dialectic and Aristotelian Philosophical Thought

Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd (ca. 1126-98), who came to be known in the Latin West as Averroes, was born at Cordoba into a family prominent for its expert devotion to the study and development of religious law (shar\u27ia). In Arabic sources al-Hafid (“the Grandson”) is added to his name to distinguish him from his grandfather (d. 1126), a famous Malikite jurist who served the ruling Almoravid regime as qadi (judge) and even as imam (prayer leader and chief religious authority) at the magnificent Great Mosque which still stands today in the city of Averroes\u27 birth and where Averroes himself served as Grand Qadi (chief judge). When the governing regime changed with the success of \u27Abd al-Mu\u27min (r. 1130-63), founder of the Almohad (al-Muwahhidun) dynasty, the members of the family continued to flourish under a new religious orientation based on the teachings of the reformer, al-Mah. di ibn Tumart (d. ca. 1129-30). Although insistent on the strict adherence to religious law, Ibn Tumart\u27s teachings were at the same time equally insistent on the essential rationality of human understanding of the existence and unity (tawhid) of God and his creation as well as the rationality of the Qur\u27an and its interpretation