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

Supremacy of suprasegmentals in Arabic phonology: Evidence from malapropisms

Speech errors are an important source of information to understand language processing and production. Earlier research focused on different types of errors including semantic and phonological errors while malapropisms, which refer to slips of the tongue involving whole word substitutions that share phonological similarities but are not related semantically, have not received adequate attention in the Arabic language. Drawing on malapropisms in Jordanian Arabic, we bring evidence on the supremacy of suprasegmental phonological aspects in Arabic phonology. This is unexpected as stress in Arabic is non-phonemic and fully predictable, besides Arabic rhythm is much less stress-timed than that of Germanic languages. Data was collected from spontaneous speech over a period of three years. Results showed that malapropisms share the primary stress position, the number of syllables and the word rhythmic pattern with the target words. To a lesser degree, the target and the error share the same rime and initial segments. Findings suggest that suprasegmental features are very crucial in Arabic phonology, like in Indo-European languages. Evidence suggests that formal similarity that is based on the syllabic and metrical structure of words plays a significant role in language processing and the organization of the mental lexicon in Arabic, which suggests that this is a language universal. Furthermore, our findings do not agree with earlier claims that Arabic has a flat syllabic structure. Rather, evidence suggests that Arabic, like English, has a hierarchical syllable structure, which seems to represent another language universal. More research on other Arabic dialects is recommended to corroborate these findings. Disclosure Statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. * Corresponding author: Mohammed Nour Abu Guba, 0000-0002-5007-6439   [email protected]

Attitudes toward Jordanian Arabic-Accented English among Native and Non-native Speakers of English

This paper explores attitudes toward Jordanian Arabic-accented English among native and non-native speakers of English. Three groups of listeners (native English speakers, Jordanian Arab specialists and non-specialists in English) were asked to rate three groups of speakers (a group of native English speakers and two groups of Jordanian Arabic bilinguals) reading a short story in English on the degree of foreign accentedness, friendliness, pleasantness and clarity. The results showed that the Jordanian Arabic speakers, especially those with a lower level of English, were perceived less favourably than the native speakers. Furthermore, the English native listeners generally had more favourable perceptions than the non-native listeners with regard to the non-native speakers. The degree of foreign-accentedness was highly correlated with attitudes toward non-native speakers, especially among the non-native speakers themselves. The results confirm that a native English accent is preferred over non-native accents

Morpho-phonological Structure of Sound Feminine Plural Suffix -aat: Revisited

This work investigates an unusual and intriguing concatenative morphophonological process which occurs in a Jordanian variety as spoken by Ahl Al-Jabal Bedouin, the native dwellers of North East Badia of Jordan. The work shows that the voiceless plosive /t/ undergoes deletion if and only if it is part of the sound feminine plural morpheme -aat. In the pre-pausal position, /t/ deletion is further compensated by the reproduction of the voiceless glottal fricative [h]. Phonologically, the final voiceless plosive /t/, in the sound feminine plural -aat, undergoes debuccalization by which it loses its original place of articulation [alveolar] and moves to the glottis to surface as [guttural] [h]. Glottal closure (glottalization) takes place via a glottal fricative [h] rather than a glottal stop [ʔ]. The results of this paper further prove that the phonological status of sound feminine pluralization in Ahl Al-Jabal dialect is significantly motivated by morphology, an interesting piece of evidence that certain morphological patterns operate in the phonological component, or at least require phonological implications

Morpho-phonological Structure of Sound Feminine Plural: Revisited

This work investigates an unusual and intriguing concatenative morpho-phonological process, which occurs in a Jordanian variety as spoken by Ahl Al-Jabal Bedouin, the native dwellers of North East Badia of Jordan. The work shows that the voiceless plosive /t/ undergoes deletion if and only if it is part of the sound feminine plural morpheme -aat. In the pre-pausal position, /t/ deletion is further compensated by the reproduction of the voiceless glottal fricative [h]. Phonologically, the final voiceless plosive /t/, in the sound feminine plural -aat, undergoes debuccalization by which it loses its original place of articulation [alveolar] and moves to the glottis to surface as [guttural] [h]. Glottal closure (glottalization) takes place via a glottal fricative [h] rather than a glottal stop [ʔ]. The results of this paper further prove that the phonological status of sound feminine pluralization in Ahl Al-Jabal dialect is significantly motivated by morphology, an interesting piece of evidence that certain morphological patterns operate in the phonological component, or at least require phonological implications

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

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 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.