Six Discourse Markers In Tunisian Arabic: A Syntactic And Pragmatic Analysis

The following study is a description and analysis of six discourse markers in Tunisian Arabic. In it I will attempt to determine the syntactic and pragmatic roles of each marker, describing its function in discourse. The final analysis will be based on the pragmatic model of relevance theory. I have based my study on thirty-two (32) texts in Tunisian Arabic, looking at frequently-occurring discourse markers in these texts and analyzing them based on their discourse roles in terms of local cohesion and pragmatic inference. The conclusions of this study focus on the conceptual and procedural content of each discourse marker. I have attempted to identify the syntactic and pragmatic role of all six markers, looking at their argumentative functions in discourse. The result is a unified pragmatic function for each discourse marker

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

Master of Arts

thesisThis thesis investigates speech accommodation and dialect leveling in three episodes of the Al-Jazeera program ﻣﻤفتوﻭﻮحﺡ ﺣﺤوﻭﻮاﺍرﺭ ḥuwār mɛftūḥ "Open Dialogue", with particular focus on the phonological change of /ḍ/ > [ð]̣ (or ظﻅﻆﻇﻈ [ʔaɪjɪðạn] in the Tunisian dialect. This study also looks at the phonological change of ظﻅﻆﻇﻈ /ð/̣ > [ẓ] in the Egyptian dialect, as well as lexical and syntactic differences between the use of relative pronouns and particles of negation. The episodes examined vary in their inclusion of speakers from across the Arabic-speaking world, and cover a range of speaking styles from reading to debating, to panel discussions, and street interviews. This thesis posits that Arabic speakers reduce dialect differences when interacting with others not familiar with their dialect, illustrating how Arabic speakers strike a balance between the mutually comprehensible "standard" and their dialect inclinations. While the Egyptian panel maintains both phonological and lexical characteristics of their dialect, the in-studio Tunisian guests predominantly use the standard language. However, there are significantly more dialect features in the speech of on-the-street iv Tunisians. Based on the data set, the Egyptians are able to maintain their dialect in the media setting because it is widely understood throughout the Arab world. Since the Tunisian dialect is not as commonly understood, the Tunisian studio guests use the standard to reach a pan-Arab audience. This sociolinguistic study illustrates the complexities of how Arabic-speakers manipulate their language depending on the social context and their audience and challenges the notion of diglossia. Furthermore, this thesis provides a description of some characteristics of Tunisian Arabic, which has not been well studied in the literature

Code-switching and language change in Tunisia

This article quantitatively studies the patterns of Tunisian Arabic/French code-switching and the possible implications for contact-induced change in the Tunisian dialect. The purpose is to account for the extent of the occurrence of code-switching across gender lines and levels of education and assess its role in the interference from French into Arabic, both at the lexical and structural levels. Recorded semi-directed sociolinguistic interviews with twelve speakers are examined for type and frequency of code-switching and use of French borrowings. Results show that education plays a role in distinguishing the group with a higher education from the group with only a high school education. The university-educated group shows a much higher frequency of code-switching that reflects a higher degree of competence in the French language. Gender, on the other hand, does not seem to be a factor in determining the frequency of code-switching. The article also shows that contact between the two languages has led to intensive lexical transfer from French into Tunisian Arabic and some instances of structural imposition that include phonological and morphosyntactic features