This dissertation explores the syntax of set of subject constructions in Tunisian Arabic (TA) comprising a NP and a third person free-standing pronoun, known in the literature of Arabic grammar as an H-Form (Fassi Fehri 1993). The subject NP-H pair has three main realisations, each of which will be shown to have a distinct information structure: an NP-H sequence, where the NP is doubled by the H-form, conveying contrastive topic, an H-NP sequence, where the NP is again doubled by the H-form, expressing a thetic meaning, and an NP-H sequence conveying contrastive/exhaustive focus where the H-form is a nominal copula of a cleft construction. The two subject doubling sequences are analysed as realisations of the same syntactic structure, a multiple subject construction (MSC), but for the values of the syntactic information-structural features [Top(ic)] and [Foc(us)]. The NP-H sequence has the NP in the spec(ifier) of a Top head and the H-form in the spec of the head Fin(ite), specified for Focus. The combination of [+Top] and [+Foc] yields the contrastive topic reading. The H-NP sequence has the H in the spec of Top and the NP in the spec of Fin. The combination of the expletive H in spec of Top and the focused NP in spec of Fin yields the thetic reading. The parameter distinguishing between languages with subject doubling of the TA type and languages without, as English, is about the specification of Fin. In English Fin has an EPP feature attracting any subject, topic or focus or expletive. In TA, Fin is specified for [Foc EPP] only. Topic-marked subjects are attracted by a higher Top head, marked for [Top, EPP], where the latter can be satisfied by an expletive in the absence of a topical subject. It will be shown that Finnish and Icelandic have the same parameter specification as TA, therefore exhibiting a MSC with properties similar to the MSC in TA. The NP-H pair is base-generated as a Small Clause embedded in a so called ‘big DP’, where the NP is the subject and the H-pronoun the predicate. There is only partial agreement between the two terms; in particular there is no person agreement. The MSC is derived by separate movement of the NP and the H-pronoun.

This study investigates nasalisation and laryngealisation in the production of pharyngeal consonants in Iraqi Arabic (IA) and as potential voice quality (VQ) settings of IA speakers in general. Pharyngeal consonants have been the subject of investigation in many studies on Arabic, primarily due to the wide range of variation in their realisation across dialects, including approximant, fricative, and stop variants. This is the first quantitative study of its kind to extend these findings to IA and to investigate whether any of the variants and/or VQ features are dialect- specific. The study offers a detailed auditory and acoustic account of the realisations of pharyngeal consonants as produced by nine male speakers of three Iraqi dialects: Baghdad (representing Central gelet), Basra (representing Southern gelet) and Mosul (representing Northern qeltu) (Blanc, 1964; Ingham, 1997). Acoustic cues of nasalisation and phonation types are investigated in isolated vowels, oral, nasal, and pharyngeal environments in order to unravel the source of the nasalised and laryngealised VQ percept and to establish whether their manifestations are categorical or particular to certain contexts. Results suggest a range of realisations for the pharyngeals that are conditioned by word position and dialect. Regardless of realisation, VQ measurements suggest that: 1- nasalisation increases when pharyngeals are adjacent to nasals, beyond what is expected of a nasal environment; 2- vowels neighbouring pharyngeals show more nasalisation than in oral environments; 3- vowels in pharyngeal contexts and isolation show more laryngealisation compared with nasal and oral contexts; 4- both nasals and pharyngeals show progressive effect of nasalisation, and pharyngeals show a progressive effect of laryngealisation; 5- /ħ/ shows more nasalisation but less laryngealisation effect on neighbouring vowels than /ʕ/; and 6- Baghdad speech is the most nasalised and laryngealised and Basra speech the least. These results coincide with observations on Muslim Baghdadi gelet having a guttural quality (Bellem, 2007). The study reveals that the overall percept of a nasalised and laryngealised VQ in IA is a local feature rather than a general vocal setting.

The main purpose of this study was to explore the language learning strategies (LLSs) used by 19 Arabic language learners, learning Arabic in Oman. It also aimed to investigate the difficulties experienced by these students in learning Arabic in the Omani context and the strategies they used to deal with these difficulties. An interpretive approach was adopted for the study, using in-depth interviewing, classroom observation, and students' diaries. Additionally, to enhance the data collected by the main methods, informal interviews with two Arabic teachers and the director of the programme were conducted. The analysis of the data generated 34 strategies which reflected the participants' use of these strategies within their social context. It has also found that the strategies could not be categorised into one universal broad type as most of them had characteristics of more than one type. Therefore, the way they are grouped in this study is mainly influenced by the way they were used by these students to achieve a specific purpose. It has also found that the strategies reported by these students and the way they were used were influenced by different factors such as the wider social context, the classroom learning environment, the teachers, the characteristics of Arabic, and finally their personal competence. Major differences were also found between these learners in the chosen strategies and the way they were applied to enhance their learning and to solve their difficulties. The data analysis indicated four types of linguistic difficulties related to the four language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing). The data showed that these four types of difficulties were attributed to different factors discussed in detail in Chapter Seven. Additionally, the findings showed that the Omani social context has an impact on these learners of Arabic. This mainly resulted from cultural differences between these participants and the Omanis. Specifically, it was found that these differences are associated with various policies applied in their own countries and the Omani society regarding the attention given for promoting the local language for non-native speakers. Also, the differences related to the academic system including the role of the teacher, the availability of resources and learning materials and finally the evaluation system in the schools were reported to affect the learning of these students. Finally, the differences related to the life style, customs and values of these students and the Omanis were found to affect their interaction with the Omani society. The data indicated that in dealing with the linguistic difficulties and cultural conflicts, these learners applied a variety of strategies. The findings have also showed that there is a great deal of similarity between the strategies students used in language learning and those they used for overcoming learning difficulties.

The aim of the thesis is to study some aspects of the surface structure of the contemporary Arabic spoken in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It is concerned mainly with the morphology (sound pattern) of the verb. it proposes a rule-system for the derivation of actual phonetic forms. from abstract, underlying forms. Broadly speaking, the mode of analysis employed here is that of Generative, Phonology as developed by Chomsky, Halle, and others, some of whom are cited in the Bibliography, The thesis consists of two main parts. One part treats the rules of the morphological component; the other treats those of the phonological component. It in assumed that the former part constitutes the input to the latter. As for the morphological component, it contains at least three main oats of rules: those which produce mainly the consonantal bases, the Derivational rules (Chapter XI); those which develop such bases into fully-fledged verb forms, the Inflectional rules (Chapter XII); and those which state the redundant features of the segments before they enter the phonological component, the Redundancy rules (Chapter X). The phonological component consists of the rules that convert the output of the above component into final, surface forms. Chapter I suggests the possibility that the traditional Paradigm can be incorporated in the phonological component of the language to capture some important generalizations, Chapter II, which also introduces the notion of Prominence into the phonological component, and Chapters III-V treat the various types of stems (Strong, Weak, etc) and give the rules that can handle the Subjective Verb. Chapters VI and VII analyses the Objective Verb and the Dative Verb, respectively, Chapter VIII investigates the system of Distinctive Features that arc required in the present analysis. Chapter IX discusses some irregular verbs and their treatment in the light of the previous discussion.

This study investigates the changes that occur in the speech of Ghamdi migrants in the city of Mecca within the framework of dialect contact. Those migrants migrated from AI-Bal), a rural area in the south-western region of Saudi Arabia, to the city of Mecca in the Hijazi region. The data were collected through sociolinguistic interviews with 49 Ghamdi speakers. Three social variables are used namely, gender, age and regionality. The speakers were divided into four age groups 14- 29, 30- 45, 46- 61 and 62+; they were also classified into six groups according to the regionality variable, which are: indigenous, near- indigenous, fairly indigenous, fairly interloper, near-interloper and interloper. This investigation was motivated by the obvious linguistic differences between rural Ghamdi and urban Meccan dialects. Five linguistic variables are examined: the interdentals (8), (0) and (D) and the diphthongs (ai) and (aw). These variables represent some of the most salient features that distinguish between the migrants' (Ghamdi) traditional dialect and the dialect of Mecca. Regarding the diphthong variables, the results showed that there is a change in progress toward monophthongs. In general, the levelling in the speech of Ghamdi migrants was clear; they abandoned the Ghamdi salient features (diphthongs) in favour of the Meccan features (monophthongs). By contrast, the study found a relatively high rate of preservation of the interdental sounds, the heritage Ghamdi features. The study argues for the emergence of a pan-Saudi dialect in which almost all regional linguistic markers are eliminated such as, diphthongs and stops.

There is irrefutable evidence that many languages use intonation to express the aspects of the information structure of an utterance. Recently evidence has emerged that languages differ in how information structure (IS) is marked intonationally. This thesis presents experimental work on the prosodic encoding of Information Focus and Contrastive Focus (aspects of IS, that is, concepts relating to the distribution of 'new' and 'contrast' information) in Hijazi Arabic (an under-researched language). It provides both a phonetic and a phonological analysis of the experimental data, the latter couched in Autosegmental-Metrical Approach. It aims to (i) provide an analysis of the word order in Hijazi Arabic (HA) and how it is used to express IS, and (ii) provide an in-depth and systematic analysis of the ways that intonation is used both phonologically and phonetically to encode neutral focus, information focus, in-situ contrastive focus and ex-situ contrastive focus in four focus structures: sentence-focus, predicate-focus, argument-focus and focus-preposing structure. Based on insights from recent research, we propose two categories of Focus: information focus and contrastive focus. We show how these categories are reflected in HA word order and in intonation. The results show that intonation and not word order is crucial and useful in identifying the focus of the HA utterance. They show that focus has local and global effects on the utterance. Focus attracts the nuclear pitch accent, and compresses the pitch accent(s) of the following word(s). Excursion size and the maximum Fa are found to be the two main acoustic correlates of prosodic focus in HA. Focused words have significantly expanded excursion size, post-focus words have significantly lowered Fa, but pre-focus words lack systematic changes.

The thesis treats of pitch features of Riyadhi Colloquial Arabic in terms of thirteen tones, ten "finals" and three "medials", an exponent of any of these being termed a "tone group". The distinction between final and medial here was based upon the fact that members of the former may occur both singly and in combination, whereas members of the medial type do not occur singly. Differentiation between one final tone and another was based upon contrastive pitch features coupled with parallel situational ones. Grammatically similar utterances were found to stand in functional contrast to each other on account of their being associated with contrastive, tono-situational features. Although the function was assigned to the tone group, or combination of tone groups, as a single indivisible unit, it was realized that no thorough comparison, ". or indeed a clear one, could be made between the various tones unless their multiplicity of patterns were first to be reduced to elements of tonal structure common to each and every one of them. These were established as: pretonic and tonic, the latter subsequently subdivided into tonic syllable and tonic extension. Because tone groups occurred singly and in combination and because the latter consisted of varying numbers and various types of components, it was necessary to establish a higher unit of structure, the contour. And in order to account for the very apparent characteristics of spontaneous speech (viz. hesitation, interruption, repetition etc. ) the contour was subdivided into "complete", "incomplete" and "interrupted". The function of the complete contours was then studied in association with "single tone groups" and "combination of tone groups". Finally the perceptual and instrumental observations upon which the analysis was based were supported by some spectrographic evidence. Because of the poor quality of the original recordings from which the spectrographic tracings were made, this evidence was given in a separate appendix.

This thesis consists of three parts and two appendices. In the course of part l affirmative, negative and interrogative sentences are discussed. Sentences of the three types are divided into different groups according to their characteristics, and various patterns of these groups are set up and analysed. After a brief introduction the discussion proceeds under three headings referring to the three grammatical categories to which these sentence-types belong, viz affirmation, negation and interrogation. At the beginning of part II the category of verbals is established and classified into groups and sub-groups, each of which is given a particular term. This is followed by separate accounts of the characteristics of two particular groups of verbs; the imperfect verb with its different forms and auxiliary verbs. } Nominals are the main theme of part III. The first chapter of this part is devoted to the establishment of the category of nominals and to the differentiation between various groups of this category. The remaining chapters -deal with important characteristics of nouns, numerals and personal, demonstrative and relative pronouns. These groups of nominals are examined as they appear in different linguistic pieces which may contain nominals only, or nominals together with forms of other categories such as verbals and particles. A: Particles and adverbs (and adverbial pieces) are classified. B: Translated texts.

The dialect under discussion is the one generally spoken by the Moslems of Algiers in 1830, and now spoken by members of a few old families in that city, The "grammatical text" that is analysed grammatically is written according to a system closely parallel to that of ordinary Arabic writing, In the analysis, successively larger grammatical structures are defined in terms of smaller ones, until sentences have been defined in a way that makes the sentence as grammatical structure correspond fairly closely to the utterance as a natural division of speech.

This thesis is a phonetic and phonolological study of the verbal piece in the Yatta dialect. It consists of three main parts. Part One, which involves Chapters 1-3, handles the grammatical framework in terms of which this phonetic and phonological study is presented. Chapter I treats the grammatical categories in terms of which the verbal piece is defined. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the classification of the various patterns of the verb in the Y. D. Part Two (Chapters 4-9) deals with the phonological elements of structure and their phonetic exponents. The phonetic description, based on the writer's feeling as a native speaker of the language, is supported by experimental evidence and the whole experimental description is involved in this part. The experimental data, however, is presented in a separate volume. Part Three (Chapters 10-20) which forms the bulk of this thesis deals in elaborate detail with=the phonological structures of the verbal piece within the framework of affixes (Chapter 10) and stem (Chapter 11-2--0) of the 10 3R and the 2 4R Patterns of the verb in terms of the phonological elements of structure set up and handled in detail in Part Two.