Ideology, Gender Roles, and Pronominal Choice: A sociolinguistic analysis of the use of English third person generic pronouns by native speakers of Arabic

This study is a sociolinguistic investigation of the use of four English generic pronouns (he, she, he or she, singular they) by Arabic-speaking second language learners of English. This study takes a different approach to the investigation of second language (L2) acquisition and use by examining the use of L2 as a function of two social constructs: gender roles and linguistic gender ideology. In this study, 150 participants (50 English NSs and 100 Arabic-speaking L2 learners of English) completed two tasks: a gender role assignment questionnaire and a written sentence completion task. The goal of the first task was to examine what gender roles (i.e., typically female, typically male, or gender neutral) the participants assign to a list of personal nouns (e.g., nurse, mechanic, and person). The goal of the second task was to examine what generic pronouns the participants use to index these personal nouns, whether rated as typically female (e.g., nurse), typically male (e.g., mechanic), or gender neutral (e.g., person). In doing so, this study aimed at examining the effect of Arab/Arabic androcentricity (i.e., male bias) on both gender role assignment and generic pronoun usage. The results of this study showed that singular they was, overall, the most commonly used pronoun by English NSs. In terms of gender roles, English NSs provided singular they for the majority of gender neutral antecedents and for almost one third of both typically male antecedents and typically female antecedents. The masculine pronoun and the feminine pronoun were used for almost half of their corresponding gender roles (i.e., typically male - he, typically female - she). The pronominal he or she was rarely, but consistently, used across all gender categories by English NSs. In comparison to English NSs, Arabic-speaking L2 learners of English rated fewer items as `typically female', but were not significantly different from NSs in terms of the number of `typically male' and `gender neutral' ratings. Unlike English NSs, Arabic-speaking L2 learners of English provided the masculine pronoun (he) for the vast majority of both typically male antecedents and gender neutral antecedents. The feminine pronoun (she) was used with the majority of typically female antecedents by these English L2 learners. The pattern of use of generic pronouns by Arabic-speaking L2 learners of English may be an indication of a typical sexist linguistic practice, where men occupy both the male and neutral positions, and women are assigned to "the marked, the gendered, the different, the forever-female position." MacKinnon (1987:55). The results of this study showed significant differences between English NSs and English L2 learners not only in terms of `gender inclusive' vs. `gender exclusive' language patterns, but also in terms of the strategies employed. Finally, these results point to the limitations of foreign language classroom input for L2 socialization, thus, for the development of L2 sociolinguistic competence

The Syntax of Answers to Positive Polar Questions in Jordanian Arabic

Responses to a polar question have recently received much attention in the syntactic literature (e.g., Yaisomanag, 2012 on Thi; Wu, 2016 on Taiwanese, Servidio et al., 2018 on Italian; among others). However, the syntax of yes-no questions in Arabic has been undermined in the literature. The present study provides a syntactic analysis of answers to positive/neutral polar questions in Jordanian Arabic. Jordanian Arabic is particularly relevant here because its system allows for a variety of answer expressions. For example, an answer to a polar question could be in the form of a particle (a: ‘yes’ and laʔ ‘no’) or a finite verb echoing the verb of the question. Following Holmberg (2016), we demonstrate that these expressions are full sentences derived by ellipses. We assume that a yes-no question has an unvalued, free polarity variable [±Pol] that needs to be assigned a value. Deriving the answer would provide a value for this variable. This involves copying the TP of the question and merging an answer particle or an abstract polarity feature (affirmative or negative) in spec-Foc to value the unvalued feature of Pol; then the TP of the answer gets deleted at the PF component under identity with the TP of the question

Effects of Gender on the Production of Emphasis in Jordanian Arabic: A Sociophonetic Study

Emphasis, or pharyngealization, is a distinctive phonetic phenomenon and a phonemic feature of Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. The goal of this study is to investigate the effect of gender on the production of emphasis in Jordanian Arabic as manifested on the consonants themselves as well as on the adjacent vowels. To this end, 22 speakers of Jordanian Arabic, 12 males and 10 females, participated in a production experiment where they produced monosyllabic minimal CVC pairs contrasted on the basis of the presence of a word-initial plain or emphatic consonant. Several acoustic parameters were measured including Voice Onset Time (VOT), friction duration, the spectral mean of the friction noise, vowel duration and the formant frequencies (F1-F3) of the vowels. The results of this study indicated that VOT is a reliable acoustic correlate of emphasis in Jordanian Arabic only for voiceless stops whose emphatic VOT was significantly shorter than their plain VOT. Also, emphatic fricatives were shorter than plain fricatives. Emphatic vowels were found to be longer than plain vowels. Overall, the results showed that emphatic vowels were characterized by a raised F1 at the onset and midpoint of the vowel, lowered F2 throughout the vowel, and raised F3 at the onset and offset of the vowel relative to the corresponding values of the plain vowels. Finally, results using Nearey‟s (1978) normalization algorithm indicated that emphasis was more acoustically evident in the speech of males than in the speech of females in terms of the F-pattern. The results are discussed from a sociolinguistic perspective in light of the previous literature and the notion of linguistic feminism