Word usage variations in Arabic newspapers: a corpus investigation

The Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is practiced in all Arab countries especially in official communication; written and spoken to unite Arab countries in certain aspects. However, a standardization of the Arabic language, particularly in the word usage is needed between Arabic countries. Seven Arabic newspapers from different countries which contain a corpus of around 87,000 words from World Affairs section are used to highlight the differences of word usage. This research is based on a theory (Kilgarriff, 2001) which states that the analysis of the consistency of word usage in corpora or sub-corpora can reveal the lexical choices. This study focuses on the discussion of several types of variations of nouns and verbs usage. The software Wordsmith 5.0 was utilized to analyze the corpus by extracting all words into frequency list and concordance. The results show that the Arabic newspapers had a great contribution in creating word usage variations, specifically in terms of spelling, loan word acceptance, verbs transitivity to particle, phrase combinations and plural formations. In some cases, the influence of foreign language such as English plays an important role in creating variation of Arabic language usage. The results of this study is hoped to increase the awareness of newspaper readers around the world regarding the significant variations in Arabic language usage and its transformations over the years

Arabic in the lead-up to the arab spring: fusion or diffusion

This article aims to place the Arabic language in its recent historical context and proposes to describe the situation of Arabic in the period preceding and leading to the Arab Spring from the perspective of the degree to which Arabic language change and variation are moving in the direction of more fusion or diffusion. By diffusion I mean a situation in which divergences among the dialects of one language continue to grow and fragment, causing them eventually to develop into separate and largely mutually unintelligible system

Negative Polarity Items and Negative Concord in Modern Standard Arabic

abstract: This thesis explores the distribution of certain lexical items in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and their relationship with two linguistic phenomena, negative concord (NC) and negative polarity items (NPIs). The present study examines two central questions: the first question investigates whether or not MSA shows the patterns of negative concord languages. The second question concerns the distribution of N-words and NPIs in MSA, and in which environments they appear. To answer the research questions, the thesis uses the framework of generative grammar of Chomsky (1995) and The (Non)veridicality Approach by Giannakidou (1998, 2000, 2002). The data reveal that MSA shows the patterns of strict negative concord languages that are suggested by Giannakidou (2000) in the sense that the negative particle obligatorily co-occurs with the N-words which strengthen the degree of negation, and never lead to a double negation interpretation. Moreover, the data show that there is only one pure NPI which appears optionally in two environments, antiveridical and nonveridical environments, and it is disallowed in veridical environments. On the other hand, the investigated indefinite nouns show a mixed picture since they work differently from their counterparts in Arabic dialects. Their descendants in Arabic dialects appear as NPIs while they tend to be indefinite nouns rather than NPIs in MSA.Dissertation/ThesisM.A. English 201

Comparative Evaluation of Translation Memory (TM) and Machine Translation (MT) Systems in Translation between Arabic and English

In general, advances in translation technology tools have enhanced translation quality significantly. Unfortunately, however, it seems that this is not the case for all language pairs. A concern arises when the users of translation tools want to work between different language families such as Arabic and English. The main problems facing ArabicEnglish translation tools lie in Arabic’s characteristic free word order, richness of word inflection – including orthographic ambiguity – and optionality of diacritics, in addition to a lack of data resources. The aim of this study is to compare the performance of translation memory (TM) and machine translation (MT) systems in translating between Arabic and English.The research evaluates the two systems based on specific criteria relating to needs and expected results. The first part of the thesis evaluates the performance of a set of well-known TM systems when retrieving a segment of text that includes an Arabic linguistic feature. As it is widely known that TM matching metrics are based solely on the use of edit distance string measurements, it was expected that the aforementioned issues would lead to a low match percentage. The second part of the thesis evaluates multiple MT systems that use the mainstream neural machine translation (NMT) approach to translation quality. Due to a lack of training data resources and its rich morphology, it was anticipated that Arabic features would reduce the translation quality of this corpus-based approach. The systems’ output was evaluated using both automatic evaluation metrics including BLEU and hLEPOR, and TAUS human quality ranking criteria for adequacy and fluency.The study employed a black-box testing methodology to experimentally examine the TM systems through a test suite instrument and also to translate Arabic English sentences to collect the MT systems’ output. A translation threshold was used to evaluate the fuzzy matches of TM systems, while an online survey was used to collect participants’ responses to the quality of MT system’s output. The experiments’ input of both systems was extracted from ArabicEnglish corpora, which was examined by means of quantitative data analysis. The results show that, when retrieving translations, the current TM matching metrics are unable to recognise Arabic features and score them appropriately. In terms of automatic translation, MT produced good results for adequacy, especially when translating from Arabic to English, but the systems’ output appeared to need post-editing for fluency. Moreover, when retrievingfrom Arabic, it was found that short sentences were handled much better by MT than by TM. The findings may be given as recommendations to software developers

Mashallah…; may Allah bless you: the sociopragmatics of giving and responding to compliments in the Hijazi Saudi dialect

This thesis investigates the influence which sociocultural values and norms can have on performing compliment exchanges in the Hijazi Saudi dialect and show whether aspects of compliment exchanges can be correlated with social variables such as gender, age and relationship. Using the field observation method and a note-taking tool, data based on real-life interactions were gathered from various social settings in Jeddah city in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. A database of 390 compliments and 482 compliment responses was compiled and classified in terms of gender, age and relationship. Compliments were investigated in terms of compliment topics, syntactic patterns, directness and indirectness, and the sociocultural phraseologies used in giving compliments. Responses were categorized in terms of response strategies and their correlations with gender, age and relationship. The examination of 390 compliments showed that compliments occurred far more frequently in same-gender exchanges than in cross-gender exchanges. Appearance was the most frequent topic over all on which Hijazi people gave compliments. Appearance was the most frequent topic used by females, whereas performance/skill was the most frequent topic for the males. The young group also tended to focus on the appearance topic, while performance/skill was the most frequent topic for the middle-aged and elder groups. (Mashallah) (ADV) (INT) NP (INT) ADJ (mashallah) was the most common syntactic pattern used among Hijazi people in giving compliments. Ijnan ‘stunning’, raw’ah/rai’a ‘wonderful’, ti’aim ‘tasty’, lazeez ‘delicious’, wala ghaltah ‘flawless’, and fakhmah ‘fancy’ were the most common adjectives used in the dataset. Intensifiers such as merrah ‘very’, haqiqi ‘really’ and harfyean ‘literally’ were top words used most frequently in giving compliments. Moreover, the findings showed that Hijazi people used explicit (direct) compliments more frequently than implicit (indirect) compliments. Mashallah, ‘may Allah’s grace be upon you’, allahuma salli ala a-nabi ‘Allah’s prayers be upon the prophet’, and tabarak allah ‘bless Allah’ tended to be unique markers for Hijazi speakers as the most frequent religious expressions used in giving compliments. Hijazi speakers believe that using such ritualistic phrases will drive the evil eye away and prevent any potential threats to the complimentee’s negative face. The examination of 482 compliment responses showed that appreciation token ranked first as the most frequent response strategy, followed by invocation and blessing. The findings showed that there were other responses which occurred in the Hijazi dialect such as evil-eye (envy) protection and request interpretation. Furthermore, the results revealed that Hijazi speakers used single responses more frequently than complex responses. The Appreciation token + return compliment complex response was on the top preferences, followed by the invocation and blessing + return compliment complex response

A sociolinguistic study of dialect contact and change in Omani Arabic

PhD ThesisThis study investigates change in the Nizwa dialect due to inter-dialectal contact caused by population movements towards Muscat. Particularly, it examines the use of five linguistic features of Nizwa Arabic belonging to different levels of the grammar. The phonological variables include the labialization of the high vowel /i/ and the vowel syncope in CV.C word-onsets. The morphosyntactic variables are affricating the second-person feminine singular suffix, marking the future with the prefix [Ɂa-] and adding /-ə/ clitics when composing yes/no questions. Data was collected from 38 participants stratified by sex, age, age of arrival (AoA) and length of residence in Muscat (Labov 2001; Siegel 2010). It was elicited using sociolinguistic interviews, picture and map tasks and a judgment/transformation test. Results confirm that the migrants’ dialect is indeed undergoing change with regard to labialization, syncope, future marker and the yes/no question clitics. This is attributed to: (i) Improved interlocutor comprehensibility in contact settings and (ii) Speakers’ desire to conform to the prestigious norms. This study presents several interesting findings to the field. First, it shows that older speakers (ages 25-50) are the highest adopters of the innovative features due to their involvement in the linguistic marketplace which increases their awareness of and thus desire to avoid stigmatized linguistic variants (Simmons 2003; Sankoff and Wagner 2006). Furthermore, a younger AoA is associated with conservative local use which is interpreted to result from maintaining local contacts in such speakers’ social networks (Milroy and Milroy 1985). Additionally, a convergence to Nizwa dialect is attested in monitored speech styles. This dialect maintenance emphasizes speakers’ desire to retain their Nizwa identity (Ivars 1994). This study shows that speakers’ ideologies and identity affiliations can be strong correlates for predicting migrants’ dialect divergence and convergence patterns (Ervin-Tripp 2002; Eckert 2003)