Stress production by Cebuano learners of Arabic: A metrical analysis

Stress is one of the most neglected components of the Arabic language in classrooms (Lin, 2018; Ryding, 2013).This study is devoted to analyzing stress production in Arabic as produced by Cebuano learners in order to highlight the challenges so that teachers can address them in the best way. The data have been examined within the metrical theory of word stress elaborated in Hayes (1995). A sample of 100 words has been considered, spoken by six non-native speakers of Arabic, three females and three males, whose first language is Cebuano, the national language of the Philippines. Data analysis shows that native Cebuano speakers have an iambic foot, where the foot involves left-to-right parsing, satisfies the End Rule Right Principle by which the main stress lands on the head of the rightmost visible foot, and imposes a weak ban on the degenerate foot. Intriguingly, foot iambicity observed in the produced words is regarded as a reflection of the speakers’ source language (L1) that has an iambic foot. Arabic words spoken by Cebuano non-natives conform to the bimoraic condition for the minimal phonological word that takes the primary stress, and is repaired only through vowel lengthening; whereas gemination, as a main strategy for creating bimoraicity, is totally absent. Similarly, vowel lengthening is seen as a transfer effect of L1, where stress always attracts a long vowel. The results point to the great importance of prosody in teaching Arabic as a foreign language, since prosodic features significantly contribute to the communication intelligibility

Hypocoristics in the Ammani-Jordanian context: A Construction Morphology perspective

AbstractThe current study explores the patterns of hypocoristics in Ammani-Jordanian Arabic in view of Construction Morphology. The most common hypocoristic patterns are addressed with reference to the social factors (gender and age) that may contribute to the templates and functions of the hypocoristic structure. This paper argues that Ammani-Jordanian Arabic speakers produce various hypocoristic patterns to signify a variety of functions. A questionnaire is designed to explore the formation of hypocoristic patterns among 51 Ammani Jordanians from three different age groups (children, young and elderly). The study shows that the most common hypocoristic pattern used by all participants includes reduplication, truncation, affixation, and adding Ɂabu “father of” and ʔum “mother of” to the male and female names, respectively. The study also reveals how these processes can be used to form hypocoristics of different name types (monosyllabic names, disyllabic names, nonce names, compound names, foreign names, etc.). We also show that the hypocoristic templates may vary according to the gender of the name. The current findings help foreign learners of Arabic to better comprehend the Jordanian culture, including the use of hypocoristics

Production of pragmatic routines by Algerian EFL learners: The effect of corpus-based instruction

The study investigates the effect of corpus-based L2 pragmatics instruction on the production of pragmatic routines by Algerian EFL learners. The sample consisted of 60 Algerian EFL learners from the University of Mohammed e-Seddik Ben Yahia, divided equally into an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group received extensive instructional intervention on the meaning and functions of pragmatic routines, while the control group received no instruction. A pre-test/post-test design was used, and a written discourse completion task (WDCT) with ten scenarios was adapted from Roever (2005) and Bardovi-Harlig (2008, 2009). The results of the pre-test show that Algerian EFL learners have a limited range of pragmatic routines. However, the results of the post-test reveal that corpus-based instruction is effective in enhancing the production of pragmatic routines. These findings have significant implications for teachers and syllabus designers, as they support the implementation of corpus-based instruction to improve the production of pragmatic routines by EFL learners

A corpus-based pragmatic analysis of Jordanians Facebook status updates during COVID-19

This study investigates the communicative functions of status updates on Facebook during COVID-19. For this purpose, a corpus of 500 status updates was collected from 100 Facebook users for 90 consecutive days. Subsequently, the data were characterized into five speech acts drawing heavily on Searle's speech act framework, prominent among which are expressives and assertives. Data analysis revealed that status updates could be considered a substantial medium for understanding intended human communication. Various types of speech acts were used with different frequencies and percentages, although people were inclined mostly to use expressive speech acts. The sociocultural variations in conjunction with forming and constructing identities were reflected in the status updates manifested in the current situation of the pandemic, which makes Jordanians appear more humorous than before. This research is significant because studying aspects of a language helps in understanding the hidden motivations, beliefs, ideas, attitudes and identities along with the social, cultural, and political factors, which in turn provides logical solutions for certain problems

Production of Gutturals by Non-Native Speakers of Arabic

This paper investigates the production of Arabic gutturals by native (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs) of Arabic. A total of 40 participants, 20 NSs and 20 NNSs, were recruited. 240 tokens were collected using two major methods: free speech and nonsense word testing. The tokens were analyzed acoustically to measure F1 and F2 and to signal the (non)significance of the difference between the target groups, and auditorily to rate gutturals production accuracy by NNSs. F1 and F2 of the vowels neighbouring the gutturals were normalized using the speaker extrinsic Labov ANAE method (NORM version 1.1) in order to eliminate the effect of gender and age. The study demonstrates some important findings: in terms of quality, the F1-F2 approximation vary by nativeness in that NNSs were unable to make enough coarticulatory effects associating Arabic gutturals. This indicates that NNSs do not make a sufficient primary constriction in the posterior regions of the vocal tract. Relying on auditory judgments of accuracy, the most accurately produced gutturals by NNSs is the voiceless glottal fricative /h/ followed by the voiced glottal plosive /ʔ/, and the lowest ranked gutturals were the voiced velar fricative /ɣ/ and the voiced pharyngeal fricative /ʕ/. The study concluded that non- temporal cues especially F1 and F2 are essential correlates to Arabic gutturals’ production. Because such factors are language-specific, they should be taken into consideration in the teaching of Arabic as a second/foreign language

The Linguistic Features of Intertextuality in Jordan's Free Verse Poetry: Ayman Al-Otoum as a Case Study

Intertextuality appears to be of crucial significance to better comprehend texts (Ahmadian and Yazdani, 2013).This research addresses intertextuality as an important technique manifested in modern Arabic poetry trying to investigate its conception, identify a sample of these salient embedded texts, and analyze them and their positive impact on enriching the text and illuminating some related issues such as ideology and perception of the world of experience in the Jordanian modern poetry, with special attention devoted to the recent poetry of Ayman Al-Otoum. Models representing this phenomenon in his poetry has been collected and compared with much assertion on the importance of this technique in enriching both levels: the idea and rhyme. The outcomes would be of a great importance to raise people’s awareness of the extensive impact of culture, religion, society on language, the tissue of the interrelated texts, enrich understanding of the language and enhance the translation practice and the quality of the translation output.

A Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis Study of WhatsApp Messenger’s Semantic Notifications

This study is the first to analyse WhatsApp’s semantic notifications particularly those of Jordanians. It also seeks to analyse the differences in these notifications’ language use by gender and endeavors to reveal some latent socio-cultural values affecting the way users make certain language choices in these online notifications. The study contributes to knowledge since such analysis helps to reveal unique networks of individuals communicating through Arabic and English in unique and innovative ways. It mainly assists in describing the members of the Jordanian society revealing a great deal of information about their personal status, their activities, society and problems. The discourse analysis of these notifications also describes how the language has been adjusted to online discourse. The written status notifications from 300 WhatsApp’s users were compiled and analysed based on a critical discourse analysis to form a predictive model of the users based on their language and to investigate the traces of social values in these semantic expressions and explain their connotations and functions in discourse. Results indicated that the language used in WhatsApp’s status notifications were a mixture of both standard and non-standard abbreviations, reduced endings which were ungrammatical. It was also found that the linguistic notifications-based assessments constitute a valid reflection of the status of its users and their society as a whole. They were as a revelation of personal, social, religious and political issues the users are concerned about. Differences with respect to gender were not found in structural construction of the language rather in categories indicating various themes. Results showed that females status updates are more personal, religious and social while males are concerned more about political, national and international themes.

A Contrastive Study of Cohesion in Arabic and English Religious Discourse

This paper aims to analyze the use of cohesion in Arabic and English religious spoken texts. Twelve texts, delivered by some of the most eloquent Imams, were analyzed in light of the model proposed by Halliday & Hasan (1976). The study reveals that lexical cohesion is the most dominant type of cohesion in Arabic religious discourse, whereas it is grammatical cohesion which dominates English religious discourse. Although both languages prefer the use of reference, conjunctions and lexical repetition, Arabic uses lexical repetition, collocation and personal pronouns more often than English. A major contribution of the present study is that it captures new cohesive devises employed in Arabic religious discourse other than proposed by Halliday & Hasan (1976): rhyming patterns and parallelism

Acquisition of stress in the speech of Ammani Arabic-speaking children

Objectives: The aim of this research is to examine the developmental stages of acquiring stress in the speech of Ammani Arabic-speaking children (henceforth AASC). Methods: Elicited and spontaneous speech productions of 48 typically developing children were transcribed and coded with the primary stress. Words were also analyzed according to their metrical shapes. The children were divided into four age groups: (1; 0–1; 6), (1; 7–2; 0), (2; 1–2; 6), and (2; 7–3; 0). Data were collected through spontaneous speech samples and picture-naming tasks. Results: Acquisition of stress goes through the four developmental stages until they become adult-like at the age of 3. Children misplace stress in the first two age stages, using an iambic foot in forms having a trochic shape. Thus, they place stress on a syllable with a geminate irrespective of the weight of other syllables. The stress shift stopped when children reached 30 months. Results support the neutral-start hypothesis which shows that children have no bias for any stress type; instead they use both trochaic and iambic feet at the outset of speaking. Conclusion: It was shown that adult weak forms are more likely to be omitted in children's production, and stressed and final ones are often preserved. This conforms with the widely accepted Perceptual Salience