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This thesis investigates the mental representation of syntactic structure. It takes an interdisciplinary approach which exploits methods and insights from both experimental psychology and theoretical linguistics to explore the claim that syntactic representation can be the subject of empirical psychological study. The thesis makes use of corpus analysis and two experimental methods, agreement error elicitation and syntactic priming, to examine syntactic structure in both language production and language comprehension. I argue that assumptions about syntactic representation are fundamental to all models of language processing. However, processing models have largely assumed the representations proposed by theoretical linguists in the belief that that syntactic representation is the province of theoretical linguistics. I propose that the mental representation of syntactic structure is a legitimate area of study for psycholinguists and that it can be investigated using experimental methods. The remainder of this thesis presents empirical evidence to support this claim. The main conclusion of this thesis is that syntactic representation is amenable to psychological study. The evidence which is gathered in this way is in principle relevant not only to theories of language processing but also to any linguistic theory which claims to characterise knowledge of language.

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"All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?" (Monty Python, The Life of Brian) Alternative phrases identify selected elements from a set and subject them to particular scrutiny with respect to the sentence's predicate. For instance, in the above example, sanitation, medicine, etc. are all identified as elements in the set of things the Romans have done for us" that should not be included in the response to the question. They are alternative responses to the desired ones. Alternative phrases come in a variety of constructions and perform a variety of tasks: excluding elements (apart from), expressing preference for particular elements (especially), and simply identifying representative examples (such as). Not a great deal of work has been done on alternative phrases in general. Hearst (1992) used a pattern-matching analysis of certain alternative phrases to learn hyponyms from unannotated corpora. Also, a few examples from a subset of alternative phrases, called exceptive phrases, have been studied, most recently, by von Fintel (1993) and Hoeksema (1995). But not all constructions are amenable to pattern-matching techniques, and the work on exceptive phrases focuses on some very specific semantic points. The focus of this thesis is to present a general program for analyzing a wide variety of alternative phrases including their presuppositional and anaphoric properties. I perform my analyses in Combinatory Categorial Grammar, a lexicalized formalism. The semantic aspects of the analysis benefit greatly from the concept of alternative sets, sets of propositions that differ in one or more argument (Karttunen and Peters, 1979; Rooth, 1985, 1992; Prevost and Steedman, 1994; Steedman, 2000a). In addition, elegant solutions are made possible by separating the semantics into assertion and presupposition (Stalnaker, 1974; Karttunen and Peters, 1979; Stone and Doran, 1997; Stone and Webber, 1998; Webber et al., 1999b)| with each performing quite different tasks. My second goal is to demonstrate the practicality and importance of this analysis to real systems. Although it is relevant to many practical applications, I will focus primarily on natural language information retrieval (NLIR) as a case study. In such a domain, queries like Where can I find other web browsers than Netscape for download? and Where can I find shoes made by Bufialino, such as the Bushwackers? are often observed. I review several techniques for NLIR and demonstrate that implementations of those techniques perform poorly on such queries. I show that understanding alternative phrases can enable simple techniques which greatly improve precision. To bridge the gap between these goals, I present Grok, a modular natural language system. Several general NLP issues necessary to support my linguistic analysis are discussed: anaphora resolution, processing of presuppositions, interface to knowledge representation, and the creation of a wide-coverage lexicon. Special attention is paid to the lexicon, which is a combination of a hand-built and an acquired lexicon.

Poetry is a unique artifact of the human language faculty, with its defining feature being a strong unity between content and form. Contrary to the opinion that the automatic generation of poetry is a relatively easy task, we argue that it is in fact an extremely difficult task that requires intelligence, world and linguistic knowledge, and creativity. We propose a model of poetry generation as a state space search problem, where a goal state is a text that satisfies the three properties of meaningfulness, grammaticality, and poeticness. We argue that almost all existing work on poetry generation only properly addresses a subset of these properties. In designing a computational approach for solving this problem, we draw upon the wealth of work in natural language generation (NLG). Although the emphasis of NLG research is on the generation of informative texts, recent work has highlighted the need for more flexible models which can be cast as one end of a spectrum of search sophistication, where the opposing end is the deterministically goal-directed planning of traditional NLG. We propose satisfying the properties of poetry through the application to NLG of evolutionary algorithms (EAs), a wellstudied heuristic search method. MCGONAGALL is our implemented instance of this approach. We use a linguistic representation based on Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) that we argue is appropriate for EA-based NLG. Several genetic operators are implemented, ranging from baseline operators based on LTAG syntactic operations to heuristic semantic goal-directed operators. Two evaluation functions are implemented: one that measures the isomorphism between a solution’s stress pattern and a target metre using the edit distance algorithm, and one that measures the isomorphism between a solution’s propositional semantics and a target semantics using structural similarity metrics. We conducted an empirical study using MCGONAGALL to test the validity of employing EAs in solving the search problem, and to test whether our evaluation functions adequately capture the notions of semantic and metrical faithfulness. We conclude that our use of EAs offers an innovative approach to flexible NLG, as demonstrated by its successful application to the poetry generation task.

Diglossia manifests itself on various linguistic levels, one of which is phonological. It poses a linguistic ‘struggle’ for speakers in the Arab world through the functional distribution that exists between the Arabic language and its varieties. This is the main drive behind diglossia. These varieties are part of the same language; hence, the term ‘diglossic-switching’ is employed when describing the alternation of speakers from one level to another. The extreme functional dichotomy in treating diglossia, such as that of Ferguson (1959) High Level and Low Level has since been replaced with a more flexible and realistic interpretation, whereby the speech situation is to be seen as one of continuum constituting a gradient of speech levels co-existing between the two extreme poles: Modern Standard Arabic (H or acrolect) and the colloquial (L or basilect). First, this study examines diglossic switching in Kuwaiti Arabic along four main dialectal phonological variables. These are [č], [g], [j], and [y]. The occurrences of each of the four phonological variables are correlated concurrently with four sociolinguistic variables (age, gender, religious affiliation, and area~origin) and six recording groups (Duwāniyya ‘social gathering’ Group Observation, Semi-Structured Interview, Political Show, Kuwait National Assembly, and Xuṭba ‘religious sermon’) to which the respondents belong. A distribution and frequency analysis shows that there is a tight, dependant relation between the production of the dialectal features and sociological/recording groups. Further, a correlational and multivariate analysis shows that only ‘age’ correlates significantly (negatively) with 3 out 4 of the dialectal markers. Following this, the study constructs and defines the mid-levels in the dialect, and identifies Kuwaiti Modern Arabic as the mesolect, being a product of constant admixture between Modern Standard Arabic and Kuwaiti Arabic in a process of diglossic-switching. It is established that that the speech situation in Kuwait is a multiglossic one, where seven overlapping levels exist in a functionally-distributed sociolinguistic relationship.

This thesis presents a theoretical overview of relativization in English, relativization in Arabic, and contrasts between them. It also investigates the problems encountered by fourth-year English department students of El-Mergib University in Libya in translating relative clauses from English into Arabic and vice versa. Despite the fact that some studies have been conducted that include relativization in English and Arabic, none of them could be considered comprehensive. Therefore, this thesis presents a detailed discussion of relativization in both languages and examines translation between them. It can also be considered as an attempt to suggest a link between contrastive linguistics and translation studies. It also aims to persuade the officials of the University of El-Mergib to revise the teaching programme at the department of English and/or to establish a new programme in which translation is taught as a separate course. This is shown in the remedial solutions suggested in the conclusion chapter of this thesis. The thesis comprises seven chapters. Chapter One is an introduction to the study. Chapter Two reviews the relevant literature on contrastive studies and relativization in the world’s languages with an emphasis on English-Arabic relativization. Chapter Three presents a theoretical discussion of translation theories, pedagogy, and assessment. Chapter Four gives a theoretical background to relativization in English, relativization in Arabic, and a contrastive study between them. Chapter Five presents the research methodology and design. Chapter Six presents the quantitative and qualitative data analysis. This chapter is the empirical part of the research. It focuses on the description of students’ errors. Chapter Seven (the last one) deals with the conclusion, presents some remedial solutions, gives some recommendations for the University of El-Mergib to overcome the students’ difficulties in translating relative clauses from English into Arabic and vice versa, and suggests some topics for further research.

Translation dictionaries are the tools of translators who use them to transfer from the source text to the target text, as they use them whenever they encounter puzzling words. Thus, this research investigates the degree of usefulness of these dictionaries when rendering English and Arabic multi-word items, such as idioms, collocations, phrasal/prepositional verbs, and compounds/iḍāfas. The aforementioned multi-word items are known for their metaphorical meanings and fixed structures, as both characteristics cause confusion to the translator/foreign language learner. The usefulness of the translation dictionaries was determined based on two criteria. First, by evaluating the use of these dictionaries for the rendering of the aforementioned multi-word items in undergraduate translation and lexicography classes. Second, by assessing the lexicographical documentation and treatment of these items in those dictionaries. It has been concluded that the percentages of dictionary use in advanced classes of translation were higher, which indicates the awareness of the importance of dictionaries in these classes. In addition, students of Arabic-English translation classes used dictionaries less than the English-Arabic classes since they dealt with texts of their native language and that English multi-word items were more difficult to render than the Arabic ones. Moreover, findings show that Arabic multi-word items were treated better than the English multi-word items in their respective dictionaries even though the English-Arabic dictionaries document more than the Arabic-English dictionaries.

This study investigates the problems that translators tend to face in the subtitling and dubbing of English-language films and television programmes into Arabic and suggests solutions for these problems. In the light of an examination of the generic features of audiovisual translation and of the particular cultural constraints inherent in translation for Arabic-speaking audiences, it is proposed that certain elements of translation theory can be useful in overcoming the technical and cultural barriers identified. This proposition is tested through analysis of the translation of three feature films, one television sitcom and an animation series that have been subtitled and dubbed into Arabic, with a particular focus on the translation of dialect, swear words, and humour. Technical, linguistic and cultural issues constitute a challenge to Arabic translators who need to deal with: 1) the limitations on screen such as space, time, lip and character synchronizations; 2) the issue of rendering English dialects into Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and 3) the problem of culture which restricts them when they want to translate taboo expressions. This results in a loss (partial or complete) of the source film’s message. Each of the audiovisual works mentioned above was considered as a case study that was analysed using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Interviews, experiments and a questionnaire were conducted in this respect to find answers to the research questions. The interviews aimed to gather evidence of how professionals translate, what problems they face and what possible solutions they may suggest for them. The experiments and the questionnaire, on the other hand, were audience-focused tools in the sense that sample audiences watched and judged the ability of a translation both in subtitled and dubbed forms to deliver the message of a movie to them, and therefore, provided evidence on the relative effectiveness of different translation procedures. Based on this, solutions were both suggested and tested in terms of their viability to overcome the barriers that emerge during the subtitling and dubbing of dialect, swear words and humour into Arabic. The findings show that translators have significant scope for improving the quality of their output, especially by adopting a more functional translation approach that can help them successfully deal with the difficulties inherent in this type of translation and make the translated dialogue have a similar effect on the target audience as that which the source text has on its audience.