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The thesis reports six experiments investigating word recognition and reading in Arabic. Experiment 1 looked at the word superiority effect in Arabic word recognition using brief presentations of stimuli (five-letter real words, pseudo-words, non-words, and inverted real words) in a Reicher-Wheeler task. The results of this experiment showed advantages for the recognition of words over pseudo-words and illegal non-words, and for pseudo-words over illegal non-words. Experiment 2 was a follow-up experiment that also examined the word superiority effect in Arabic by using the lexical decision task. In this experiment, participants viewed briefly presented real words and legal non-words, with the results showing that Arabic real words were recognised quicker and more accurately than non-words. Experiment 3 investigated the landing position effects for three, five, and seven letter words in Arabic using eye movements while reading. The results showed that the preferred viewing location (PVL) is at the right of centre of words in Arabic, similar to that for Hebrew. Experiment 4 re-examined the optimal viewing position in Arabic word recognition using five-letter Arabic words and non-words in a lexical decision task. The results showed that participants recognised words most quickly and most accurately when fixating inter-letter locations at the middle of words, indicating that the OVP for Arabic word recognition is at a word’s centre. Experiment 5 used the Reicher-Wheeler task and Experiment 6 used the lexical decision task to re-examine the claim that an anatomical division in the human fovea has consequences for word recognition. The findings revealed the superiority of the right visual field for words displayed outside the foveal and no asymmetries for words displayed within foveal vision. Thus far the research has made an important advance on our understanding of processes involved in Arabic word recognition by revealing that word superiority and pseudo-word superiority effects similar to those reported in Latinate languages are also observed in Arabic, and that the OVP effect in Arabic differs from that found in English. The reading results indicate that, similar to other languages, parafoveal word length information is used to guide saccade targeting in Arabic.

This thesis investigated the attitudes, motivational orientations and demotivation of the non-Muslim Malaysian learners of Arabic (NMMLAs) as a foreign language in the Malaysian context. Adopting mixed method approach, questionnaire and semi-structured interview were selected for data collection involving 207 and 20 students respectively. Results indicate the NMMLAs’ highly positive attitude toward foreign languages, and moderately positive attitude toward native Arabic speakers and toward learning Arabic, where studying Arabic is not perceived negatively despite being a compulsory subject. Four types of underlying orientations toward learning Arabic were shown. The highest ranked is instrumental orientation, indicating a strong reason for learning Arabic to fulfil the university’s requirement. The NMMLAs show moderate attitude toward intrinsic and integrative orientation in learning Arabic. The NMMLAs’ responses also revealed a new type of orientation i.e. ethnic-relationship of learning Arabic, where learning Arabic can enhance the relationship between Malaysia’s ethnic groups. The NMMLAs’ immediate learning context attitude revealed the importance of teacher’s personality in motivating students, where intelligence, patience and humour are vital traits teachers should posses. The results show the significant impact of the learning context on the students’ motivation in learning Arabic. The NMMLAs view the nature of Arabic language as the most demotivating factor, where Arabic pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and writing are among the difficulties they encountered. Although teachers are perceived as the most important motivating factor, the NMMLAs also reported teachers’ teaching method and behaviour as the second demotivating factor. Other factors extracted are classroom, negative attitudes toward foreign languages, course materials, Arabic course’s compulsory nature, low score, time constraint, lacking opportunities to communicate in Arabic, self-inability and irrelevance to their study. Pedagogical recommendations were made to help ensure the NMMLAs’ instrumental, intrinsic and integrative motivation in learning Arabic. This study has provided new insights into teaching and learning Arabic particularly in broadening the horizon of teaching Arabic in Malaysian context.

~ajwid (Tajweed) - the tradition of the Holy Qur'an's recitation - is composed of about twenty-eight phonological patterns, which have an underlying semantidpragmatic meaning of sacredness. Nasal n assimilation patterns of 'idgh?im (gemination with & without nasalization), 'ikhfa' (nasal place assimilation), 'i+b (labial place assimilation) and %ihhiir (zero nasal assimilation) are taken as representative of Tajwid in this work. The central theme of this thesis is two fold. First, the twenty-eight sounds of the language of the Holy Qur'an (LHQ) as used in the four patterns of nasal n assimilation are distributed among the three natural sound classes of sonorants, obstruents and gutturals, the latter of which crosscuts the other two. Second, the realization of the meaning of sacredness in the LHQ is best accounted for by Kurisu's (2001) Realize Morpheme Theory set in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). Kurisu's (2001) Realize Morpheme constraint is expanded herein to encompass a variety of meanings; i.e., morphosyntactic and non-morphosyntactic. Like Kurisu (2001), I contend that faith is relativized to the meaning expressed in that each pattern is determined by ranking a particular faithfulness constraint in relation to RM. However, the meaning expressed in the LHQ is non-morphosyntactic. This thesis is organized as follows. Chapter one introduces the reader to the Language of the Holy Qur'an through describing its genetic affiliation and geographical location in addition to past research done on it and the theoretical assumption adopted. Chapter two describes each patterniprocess of nasal n in the LHQ, whereas chapter three explores how the LHQ sounds are grouped into natural sound classes. Finally, chapter four analyses nasal n patterns in the LHQ using Kurisu's (2001) Theory of Realize Morpheme set in Optimality Theory.

The study is divided into two parts. The first part provides a substantial academic examination and a critical evaluation of the discipline of the manuscript, as well as an extensive and detailed introduction of the manuscript and its author, Ala’ al-Din Muhammad Ibn Muhammad al-Bukhari al-Hanafi.  It includes the necessary background about the topic as well as the significance and objectives of the study. It also includes biographical details about the author of the manuscript together with a critical assessment of its contribution to the field.  The second part covers the critical edited text of the manuscript.

The present study deals with the syntax of the Arabic dialect of Abha in south-west of Saudi Arabia It is a synchronic study which deals with the everyday usage of the dialect. Diachronic changes are sometimes indicated where relevant. The phonology and morphology of the dialect are discussed in brief where necessary. This dialect has many distinctive features some of which do not occur in other dialects. The dialect is going through remarkable change due to people's tendency to change affected by the spread of education, mass media and communication. Thus the study has been conducted to examine some syntactic features of the dialect and record them before the dialect loses those features, and to make this dialect accessible for further research in sociolinguistic or diachronic studies. This study comes in two parts. The first part deals with the classification of the main parts of speech and their function in context. This part comprises four chapters: the first chapter deals with the noun and its sub-classes; the second chapter deals with the verb and its relation with the pronouns; the third chapter deals with particles and their functions in the sentence; the fourth chapter deals with functionals and their functions in the sentence. The second part examines the relationships between parts of speech. This part also comprises four chapters which deal respectively with: predication, annexation, complementation and attnbution.

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This thesis is about optimising a rule based parser for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). If ambiguity is a major problem in NLP systems, it is even worse in a language MSA due to the fact that written MSA omits short vowels and for other reasons that will be discussed in Chapter 1. By analysing the original rule based parser, it turned out that many parses were unnecessary due to many edges being produced and not used in the final analysis. The first part of this thesis is to investigate whether integrating a Part Of Speech (POS) tagger will help speeding up the parsing, or not. This is a well-known technique for Romance and Germanic languages, but its effectiveness has not been widely explored for MSA. The second part of the thesis is to use statistics and machine learning techniques and investigate its effects on the parser. This thesis is not about the accuracy of the parser. It is about finding ways to improve the speed. A new approach will be discussed, which was not explored in statistical parsing before. This approach is collecting statistics while parsing, and using these to learn strategies to be used during the parsing process. The learning process involves all the moves of the parsing (moves that lead to the final analysis, i.e good moves and moves that lead away from it, i.e. bad moves). The idea here is, not only we are learning from positive data, but also from negative data. The questions to be asked: • Why is this move good so that we can encourage itl • Why is this move bad so that we discourage it. In the final part of the thesis, both techniques were merged together: integrating a POS tagger and using the learning approach, and finding out the effect of this on the parser.

Lexical relations have been thoroughly investigated cross-linguistically (Lyons, 1977; Cruse, 1986; Murphy, 2003). Antonymy is particularly interesting because antonymous pairs share both syntagmatic as well as paradigmatic relations. Studies (such as Raybeck and Herrmann, 1996) agree on the universality of this lexical relation; however, different perspectives towards opposition have been noted among different cultures (Murphy et al., 2009; Jones et al., 2012; Hsu, 2015). The present corpus-driven study investigates antonym use in Modern Standard Arabic text using an on-line corpus (arTenTen12) and a newspaper corpus (arabiCorpus). This thesis shows that antonym functions in Arabic are to a certain degree similar to those found in other languages. A new classification of these functions is presented and compared to previously identified functions in English text (Jones, 2002; Davies, 2013). The main difference between this classification and previous ones is in the category Ancillary Antonymy. In this category, canonical antonyms trigger contrast in non-contrastive pairings. The ancillary use of antonyms is presented as an effect projected on other words regardless of the hosting construction. As a consequence of removing this category, other functions of antonym use were identified. The present study also shows that a Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG) account of antonyms can capture their syntagmatic and paradigmatic properties. Antonyms lend themselves well as pairings of meaning and form and therefore can be treated as constructions (Jones et al., 2012). Therefore, a treatment of antonyms using SBCG is presented in this study. Based on this treatment, I present a SBCG account of Arabic coordination as a contrastive construction in which antonyms frequently occur. The coordination construction is then compared to one use of coordination that presents antonym pairs as units referring to one concept.

This thesis provides a synchronic morphosyntactic description of the Hadari dialect, a variety of Gulf Arabic spoken in Kuwait, and presents a current documentation of this rapidly changing, under documented spoken dialect of Arabic. The description covers the basic morphology and syntax of Hadari, focusing mainly on the syntax. The description refers to Modern Standard Arabic both as a point of comparison and a point of reference when describing the spoken dialect's morphology and syntax. The study also draws on discussion of existing descriptions of the dialect and reflects upon their current adequacy. This thesis adopts a typological approach to describing the Hadari dialect, making reference both to Greenbergian typology and to modern typological theory. Two of the main typological theories applied in this description include an application of Matthew Dryer's exceptionless properties of V-initial languages (1990) and of the Branching Direction Theory (Dryer1992), to the spoken dialect. Furthermore, the study sheds light on the similarities and differences between Modern Standard Arabic and Hadari, regarding the expression of various syntactic aspects. One of the more significant contributions in this section is the typological description of the relative clause in Hadari. Furthermore, the thesis provides descriptions of clause structure, word order, modality, valency, copular clauses, interrogatives, negation, and subordination, in Hadari. The analysis is based on empirical data from recordings of everyday interactions in uncontrolled environment, television shows, radio broadcasts, and personal interviews.