Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Muṭarrizī al-Naḥwī (d.610/1213) was one of the most renowned figures in the field of Arabic grammar. He has left an indelible mark on the world of Arabic language and literature. He is also known as the successor of al-Zamakhsharī. He wrote a number of books but his al-Miṣbāḥ fī al-Naḥw gained prominence at a level that no other book in this field could claim to achieve. For this reason, a great number of commentaries have been written in every age, of which the most famous are al-Ḍaw and Khulāṣat al-I'rā written by Tā al-Dīn al-Isfrā'īnī and 'Abd al- Karī al-Ṭūsī (better known as Ḥājjī Bābā) respectively. Moreover, its translation into other languages also demonstrates its value as a useful book. Although al-Miṣbāḥ has been edited on more than one occasion, the published editions do not fulfil the needs and requirements of modern academic research criteria. The basic aim of this thesis is to present this book with a current modern research style so that the students, teachers and ordinary readers of Arabic language and literature may benefit from this work. This thesis is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the life history of the author and his other works. A brief note of the environment under which he grew up (generally referred to as the 'Seljuk' period) is also included in this part. The second part consists of a text edition that deals with the derivation (Takhrīj) of syntactical issues together with the differing opinions of grammarians on syntactical/grammatical issues. This part also proffers the idiomatic English translation of al-Miṣbāḥ.

The status of English as a lingua franca (ELF) has become an increasingly popular topic in Applied Linguistics. It has been suggested that the native speakers (NSs) and their pronunciation models have become relatively unimportant in international communication. This results in a lively discussion of which pronunciation model to use in classrooms (Dauer, 2005). Jenkins (2000) proposed the Lingua Franca Core (LFC): a list of features which she presumes to be the minimum required to result in intelligible communication among non-native speakers (NNSs) and should form the basis upon which the pronunciation syllabus of learners of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) should be designed. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of a pronunciation syllabus based on the LFC in improving the intelligibility and comprehensibility of Arab learners in comparison to learners of the traditional pronunciation syllabus (based on Received Pronunciation and/or General American). The potential effect of the syllabus was determined by implementing a quasi-experimental approach and semi-structured interviews within which the buzzer-technique was implemented. This research found that learners of the LFC syllabus scored relatively higher in comparison to the learners of the traditional pronunciation syllabus in terms of intelligibility and comprehensibility scores. The difference, however, between both groups remained insignificant. The degrees of intelligibility and comprehensibility were influenced by several factors. The interviewee's knowledge about the phonology of Arabic and exposure to non-native varieties facilitated intelligibility and comprehensibility. Negative attitudes towards certain phonological features, in most instances, did not impede intelligibility and/or comprehensibility. The research also gives support to most of the core features in the LFC except the rhotic /r/, quality of the long vowel /ɜː/, and word stress in words of more than two syllables. While this research implies the need to modify the LFC pronunciation syllabus based on the Arab learners’ phonology, further research is still required to investigate the pronunciation syllabus needs for learners in other contexts.

This study examines Web-based conversation, focusing on Chinese academic discussion, from a Conversation Analysis (CA) perspective. The research investigates repair in asynchronous talk-in-interaction on the Web and compares this with repair in ordinary conversation in English, as analysed by Schegloff et al. (1977). It also explores the reasons for any differences which arise from the setting in which this study takes place. The research analyses naturally occurring written interaction on Web-based discussion boards from two education courses offered by the Open University of Hong Kong. Over 4,000 po stings, with nearly half a million Chinese characters, which were contributed by 400 participants were captured and analysed. The study adds fresh data to existing CA work on repair and talk-in-interaction, and provides new information about how repair is organized in asynchronous conversation in Chinese through the Web - an area in which very limited work has been carried out to date. The research shows that repair systems exist in Web-based conversation and that, while the basic possible structures for repair are the same as in ordinary conversation, some operations in the system are different. Seven forms of initiation techniques for repair and ten repair patterns in Web-based conversation are identified and exemplified. The analysis of 351 instances of repair shows that the majority (63.2%) are other-repairs, which demonstrates that preferences in repair in Web-based academic discussions are very different from those which have been proposed for ordinary conversation. The study deals with three external factors that have an impact on repair in Web-based conversation, namely the medium of the Web, asynchronous interaction, and the written form of language use, of which the first is the central, as the latter two are determined by it. The study concludes by discussing some possible implications of the findings for distance learning and teaching, and also for developing technology for human communication through the Internet, in particular the Web.

This research studies the phonological structure and representation of first words in Hijazi Arabic. It investigates the representational nature of early words and the developmental stages of their syllable and word internal structure within the framework of the Prosodic Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1986, 1990). The issues raised relate to the relation between child and adult phonology, and whether the subjects follow a universal path or influenced by their language-specific phonology (Ferguson & Farewell, 1975; Vihman, 1991; Fikkert, 1994; Demuth, 1995; Ota, 2003; Lleo, 2006). The discussion has been accompanied by considering child-adult differences and cross-linguistic comparisons between child Arabic and child Germanic languages (English, Dutch), child Romance languages (French, Spanish, and Catalan), and child Japanese. Cross-sectional spontaneous data were collected from twenty two monolingual children (aged from 1;0 to1;9) living in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia by recording their speech using the object-naming technique in near natural settings and analyzed using a qualitative approach. The results show that the subjects’ segmental inventories are very limited at the onset of speech, which determines the shape of their early words. The subjects often employ phonological processes (e.g. reduplication, consonant harmony, substitution, truncation) when their templates cannot accommodate all the segmental material of the target words. The data provide evidence that the phonological structure of their early words has the same organizational units of adult phonology and governed by its prosodic principles. The subjects go through similar stages of prosodic word development to those reported in the literature: a minimal word stage (1;0-1;6), where their outputs display bimoraic and disyllabic forms, followed by a maximal stage (between 1;7-1;9), where more complex structures are produced. Despite the universality of many aspects of word acquisition in child Arabic, the study emphasizes the importance of investigating the impact of the ambient language and the role of language specific phonologies.

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The course description is a brief, yet comprehensive, written account of a course teachers produce and give to their students at the beginning of courses. Course descriptions (CDs) are routinely produced and used in many educational institutions. However, with the exception of few passing references to them in Elliot (1997) and Swales (1990), discourse analysis has not sought to provide good understanding. This study is an attempt to fill in such a gap in knowledge by exploring the CD in the context of higher education in the United Arab Emirates, where the researcher has been working up to the completion of the present study. Employing the technique of triangulation, the study forms a methodology that combines Foucault’s approach to discourse, action research and the critical and interpretative paradigms as a basis for analyzing data from 12 CDs, questionnaires and interviews. On the level of analysis, Foucault’s approach to discourse has been operationalized by Systemic Functional Linguistics and Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse. Within the framework of the Systemic Functional Linguistics, the CD as a text is approached from three perspectives: Field, Tenor and Mode. This has revealed the overwhelming use of long clauses, the constitution of the student as’expected to study‘, not as thinking or knowing entity, the use of the Declarative Mood, ambiguity of the source and receiver, ellipsis and obligatory sections. The purpose of investigating the CD within the framework of Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse was to shed light on CD perspectives that could not be accounted for by the text analysis on its own. Thus, it described the roles, production, transmission and reproduction processes of the CD and the attitudes of teachers and students towards it. Thus, it has been concluded that the CD is dominantly regulative, that it is imposed by the Accreditation Committee under the pressure of globalization and that its use needs to be improved or stopped.

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