Impoliteness strategies at a Jordanian hospital Emergency Room

Impoliteness as a natural phenomenon is observed in many face-to-face encounters. It is employed to cause offense and attack the face of the hearer and sometimes over-hearers. One of the researchers who was working at the University of Jordan Hospital noticed that patients and/or their relatives use verbal and nonverbal impolite behaviour when addressing the hospital staff and doctors. In order to investigate the various strategies utilised by Arabic speaking patients and/or their relatives to express impoliteness towards the Emergency Room (ER) staff at a Jordanian hospital, observation and note-taking were used to collect the impolite instances for a period of 30 days during April 2014. A total of 100 face-to-face interactions, which included impolite expressions were collected. The results of the study showed that the patients and their relatives used 208 impoliteness instances while interacting with the admin staff, nurses and doctors. The most used strategy of impoliteness was ‘bald on record impoliteness’ followed by ‘negative impoliteness’, ‘positive impoliteness’, ‘sarcasm or mock politeness’ and ‘withhold politeness’. The study concludes that the various types and strategies of impoliteness used by the patients and/or their relatives were aiming at offending and threatening the face of the hospital staff and doctors, and this behaviour, as observed in the various interactions that took place, could be attributed to their dissatisfaction of the health care services provided

A cross-cultural analysis of disagreement strategies in Algerian and Jordanian Arabic

This study aims to explore the use of disagreement strategies in two Arabic dialects: Jordanian and Algerian Arabic. It also investigates the effect of social status on the choice of disagreement strategies adopting Muntigl’s and Turnbull’s (1998) taxonomy. To achieve these objectives, 40 participants (20 Jordanians and 20 Algerians) were randomly recruited to respond to a discourse completion task (DCT). The participants were requested to read six situations and to react to them by making disagreements with people of higher, equal and lower statuses. A mixed-method approach was used to analyse the data. The results showed that the participants in the two study groups share similar preferences in the use of two main disagreement strategies that scored the highest in High to Low, Low to High, and in Equal statuses. The findings are discussed in the light of (im)politeness and provide implications for socio-pragmatic research in Arabic linguistics

Hypocone Reduction and Carabelli’s Traits in Contemporary Jordanians and the Association between Carabelli’s Trait and the Dimensions of the Maxillary First Permanent Molar

The objective of this study is to determine the prevalence of expression and bilateralism of two dental morphological traits in contemporary Jordanians: The hypocone reduction trait on the maxillary second permanent molar and Carabelli’s trait on maxillary permanent first and second molars. Furthermore, inter-trait correlation and the relationship of Carabelli’s traits with upper first molar dimensions were investigated. Three hundred subjects of school children at their 10th grade and of an average age of 15.5±0.4 years were involved. Alginate impressions for the maxillary arch were taken, dental casts were reproduced. The selected accurate casts were of 132 male- and 155 female-students. The frequencies of hypocone reduction trait on the maxillary second molar and Carabelli’s trait on the maxillary molars were examined. Buccolingual and mesiodistal diameters of the maxillary first molar were measured and recorded. Paired Sample t test and Nonparametric Correlation analysis were used for data analysis. Hypocone reduction trait on the maxillary second molar was found in 29.8 % of the examined students. Positive forms of Carabelli’s trait on first and second molars were observed in 65.0 % and 3.8 %, respectively. Nonparametric correlation analysis revealed positive association between Carabelli’s trait on first molar and hypocone reduction trait on the maxillary second molar. The presence of Carabelli’s trait on first molar was strongly associated with the increase of buccolingual, but not the mesiodistal, diameter. Bilateralism was found highly significant in the tested traits and both genders (p<0.001). This finding might be a sign of relatively low environmental stresses in the living Jordanian population and/or great ability of its individuals to buffer the adverse effects of such stresses

Multiple Lingual Cusps Trait on Mandibular Premolars and Hypoconulid Reduction Trait on Mandibular First Molar in Living Jordanian Population. Intra- and Inter-trait Interactions

The objective was to determine the expression and fluctuating asymmetry of two dental morphological traits in the living Jordanians: The lingual cusp number on the lower premolars (LP1 and LP2) and the hypoconulid (distal cusp) reduction on the lower first molar (LM1). In addition, both intra- trait and inter- trait interactions were analyzed. Three hundred school children (15.5± 0.4 years) were involved. Impressions for the mandibular dental arches were taken, and dental casts were reproduced. The above-mentioned traits were observed. Paired sample t test and nonparametric corre- lation analysis were used for data analysis. Three-cusped LP1 was found in 11.40 % of the examined students, while the two-cusped LP1 was found in 88.60%. In comparison, the Three-cusped LP2 was found in 61.40% while the two-cusped LP2 was found in 38.60% of the observed subjects. The frequencies of the 4-cusped and 5-cusped LM1 were found to be 8.65% and 91.35%, respectively. Nonparametric correlation analysis revealed positive and statistically significant asso- ciation between the expression of two lingual cusps on LP1 and on LP2 in both genders (p0.05). Bilateralism was highly significant in the tested traits in both genders (p<0.001).This finding might be a sign of relatively low environmental stresses experienced by the living Jordanians and/or great ability of its individuals to buffer the adverse effects of such stresses on dental development. This study is a useful addition to the ex- isting literature in that it examines a previously poorly characterized population and assists in placing the contemporary Jordanian population within the current framework of human population groups globally

Hypocone Reduction and Carabelli’s Traits in Contemporary Jordanians and the Association between Carabelli’s Trait and the Dimensions of the Maxillary First Permanent Molar

The objective of this study is to determine the prevalence of expression and bilateralism of two dental morphological traits in contemporary Jordanians: The hypocone reduction trait on the maxillary second permanent molar and Carabelli’s trait on maxillary permanent first and second molars. Furthermore, inter-trait correlation and the relationship of Carabelli’s traits with upper first molar dimensions were investigated. Three hundred subjects of school children at their 10th grade and of an average age of 15.5±0.4 years were involved. Alginate impressions for the maxillary arch were taken, dental casts were reproduced. The selected accurate casts were of 132 male- and 155 female-students. The frequencies of hypocone reduction trait on the maxillary second molar and Carabelli’s trait on the maxillary molars were examined. Buccolingual and mesiodistal diameters of the maxillary first molar were measured and recorded. Paired Sample t test and Nonparametric Correlation analysis were used for data analysis. Hypocone reduction trait on the maxillary second molar was found in 29.8 % of the examined students. Positive forms of Carabelli’s trait on first and second molars were observed in 65.0 % and 3.8 %, respectively. Nonparametric correlation analysis revealed positive association between Carabelli’s trait on first molar and hypocone reduction trait on the maxillary second molar. The presence of Carabelli’s trait on first molar was strongly associated with the increase of buccolingual, but not the mesiodistal, diameter. Bilateralism was found highly significant in the tested traits and both genders (p<0.001). This finding might be a sign of relatively low environmental stresses in the living Jordanian population and/or great ability of its individuals to buffer the adverse effects of such stresses

Feature extraction and selection for Arabic tweets authorship authentication

© 2017, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. In tweet authentication, we are concerned with correctly attributing a tweet to its true author based on its textual content. The more general problem of authenticating long documents has been studied before and the most common approach relies on the intuitive idea that each author has a unique style that can be captured using stylometric features (SF). Inspired by the success of modern automatic document classification problem, some researchers followed the Bag-Of-Words (BOW) approach for authenticating long documents. In this work, we consider both approaches and their application on authenticating tweets, which represent additional challenges due to the limitation in their sizes. We focus on the Arabic language due to its importance and the scarcity of works related on it. We create different sets of features from both approaches and compare the performance of different classifiers using them. We experiment with various feature selection techniques in order to extract the most discriminating features. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of its kind to combine these different sets of features for authorship analysis of Arabic tweets. The results show that combining all the feature sets we compute yields the best results

INSTANT MESSAGING LANGUAGE IN JORDANIAN FEMALE SCHOOL STUDENTS’ WRITING

This study seeks to examine the existence of Instant Messaging language phenomenon among female teenagers in some Jordanian private schools and its influence on their learning experience, mainly literacy. It also raises questions about the characteristics of textese as well as teachers’ attitude towards their students’ use of SMS language in their academic writing. The methodology used in this study involves the descriptive and quantitative analysis of writings taken from 320 female teenagers in four different private schools in Amman, Jordan following National and International Programs as well as the responses to a questionnaire filled out by 100 EFL teachers. Upon the examination of these writings, it becomes clear that Instant Messaging language appears in students’ writing, and teachers have reservations towards its use by their students in their writing. Data suggest that teachers should raise students’ awareness of this issue to help them effectively control and enhance the influence of Instant Messaging on their academic writing

Hedging in Political Discourse: Evidence from the Speeches of King Abdullah II of Jordan

This paper reports on the findings of a study that aimed to identify the linguistic items which act as hedges in the speeches of King Abdullah II of Jordan, as well as to examine the pragmatic functions of these devices. Twenty-five political speeches of King Abdullah II, randomly selected from the official website of King Abdullah (see Appendix), were analyzed adopting Salager-Meyer’s (1994) taxonomy. The study revealed that the most frequently used hedging device in King Abdullah’s speech is modal auxiliaries, and the most frequently used hedging device subcategory is the modal auxiliary “can”. The findings suggest that these hedging devices fulfil several pragmatic functions. These findings contribute to understanding that speaking a second language (Arabic, in the case of King Abdullah II) neither affects the types of hedging devices nor the functions these devices perform. Moreover, contrary to scientific discourse (e.g., medicine), the research concludes that political discourse as a non-scientific genre resorts to hedging devices to express indirectness, politeness, lack of commitment and probability

Persuasion in Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump\u27s Presidential Debates: A Critical Discourse Analysis

The present study aims to provide a critical discourse analysis of the persuasion tactics, power distribution, and the ideological stands in the American presidential debates of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The methodology adopted in this study was based on Fairclough\u27s model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (1995). The thorough analysis of the debates revealed strong dichotomy and contested ideological stands, dissimilar power distribution, and the use of varying persuasive tools of both candidates on all the issues of concern such as immigration, economy, human rights, etc. The author recommends further investigation of the presidential debates across varying cultures based on Fairclough\u27s model of CDA