This work dealing with the spoken Arabic of Baskinta is the result of material collected during two visits to that area in 1968 and 1969, and research carried on in this country. While in Baskinta I have particularly avoided consulting educated members of the community and those whose work had taken them to other parts of the country or abroad, for fear that their spoken language might be different from the standard local speech. I, therefore, relied mainly on people with little education or none at all. I tried especially to consult both Greek Orthodox and Maronites as regards comparative lexicography, but found very little material in this field. In London I was fortunate in meeting and consulting several Baskintäwis who were most helpful in answering questions put to them. In the introduction I have discussed the geographical, historical and social background. I have divided the thesis proper into three major sections on phonology, morphology and syntax. Following the syntax I have included some texts transcribed from unprepared spontaneous speech, which I feel is necessary in the presentation of any work of this kind. In the appendixes I have given paradigms of the conjugation of verbs and notes on the treatment of loan words, since the spoken language of Baskinta includes a large number of non-Arabic words. I have also included in the appendixes some notes on the correspondence between Classical Arabic and Baskintawi forms.

The material presented in this thesis was collected mainly during the course of a sabbatical leave in the Persian Gulf in 1958-1959. Little work has been done up to the present on the dialects of this area , and this thesis attempts to present the salient features of these dialects , along with texts illustrating facets of their grammar and vocabulary. The thesis contains an introductory chapter, in which it is attempted to show the relationship of this group of dialects to those other dialects of Arabia , with which comparison seemed relevant, but no final classification can be attempted until further comparative material is available. Section I discusses the phonetics and grammar of the Kuwaiti dialect, and presents some texts. Phonetics and morphology are discussed fairly fully here, so that similar points can be treated more briefly in the succeeding sections. Section II consists of notes on the Beduin dialects spoken in Kuwait. The main work in this field was done in Dosiri, and this is set out in the article submitted with this thesis . Some further notes on this dialect are given in the text of the thesis. Section III deals with the Bahraini dialect. Here there is good illustrative material available, and this has been utilised in setting out the description of this dialect . Section IV deals with the Qatari dialect and, very briefly, with the Hajiri dialect as spoken in Qatar • Texts illustrating both dialects are included. Section V gives notes on tbe dialects of Abu Dhabi (Zabi) , Buraimi and Dubayy. The texts here cover only the Dubayy dialect. The thesis is not presented as a comparative study of this group of dialects, but the numeration of the various parts is standard throughout from Section I, in order to facilitate cross-reference.

This dissertation explores the syntax of ellipsis in Libyan Arabic (LA henceforth) focusing on sluicing, verb phrase ellipsis, stripping and negative contrast. These elliptical structures have not been studied in the language before; therefore, this study provides the first description of these phenomena from a generative perspective. Chapter three provides an overview of the status of ellipsis in syntactic theory and shows that there is compelling evidence that several ellipsis sites contain syntactic structure, which consequently can be treated as PF deletion phenomena. Chapter four investigates sluicing and attempts to determine whether what appears as sluicing is sluicing or pseudosluicing. It is revealed that some apparent cases of sluicing are instances of pseudosluicing despite their superficial appearance as sluicing. This follows from the fact that in this null subject language with covert copulas and noncase- marked wh-expressions, sluicing and pseudosluicing can be indistinguishable in some contexts. Chapter five discusses the interaction between preposition stranding (p-stranding) and sluicing. It concludes that the apparent cases of p-stranded sluices are instances of pseudosluicing. Therefore, two sources of IP ellipsis are proposed: sluicing and pseudosluicing. The former derives from regular wh-questions and conforms to the p-stranding generalisation; while the latter results from the deletion of a clefted clause whose pivot is an extracted wh-phrase. The fact that the preposition in cleft wh-questions resides in the relative clause, which is eventually deleted in pseudosluicing, yields the illusion that such constructions involve p-stranding. Finally, the proposed analysis provides novel evidence for Shlonsky’s (2002) analysis of Arabic Class II wh-questions as copular clauses. Chapter six discusses two cases of verb phrase related ellipsis, referred to as modal ellipsis and verb-stranding VP ellipsis. In the former, the complement of the modal verb is deleted, while in the latter, where the lexical verb is assumed to have raised to T, the complement of the main verb plus all vP-related material are elided. Given that modal ellipsis exhibits missing antecedents and binding effects and allows for extraction in some contexts, it is proposed that such an ellipsis is a gap with internal syntactic structure, which thus can be analysed as VP deletion at PF. As for the putative verb-stranding VP ellipsis, I will propose that this should not be analysed as VP ellipsis as in Farsi, Hebrew and Finnish. Rather, it should be reducible to null objects and/or individual constituent drop. This claim rests on two arguments. First, unlike VP ellipsis, the putative verb-stranding VP ellipsis is subject to definiteness restrictions; second, it differs from VP ellipsis with respect to the deletion of vPrelated material. Finally, chapter seven is concerned with stripping and negative contrast. It is proposed that both constructions involve TP ellipsis. The remnant in such constructions undergoes movement to the left periphery followed by TP deletion. However, stripping and negative contrast are distinct in terms of their interaction with information structure, that is, while the remnant in stripping is perceived as new information focus, in negative contrast it is interpreted contrastively.

The phenomenon of the influence of one language upon another is closely related to that of the influence of a culture upon another. Cultures are always travelling from place to place carrying with them linguistic elements to other peoples and influencing their lives as well as their languages in various degrees. When the British and the Americans came to the Middle Eastern Arab countries as missionaries and military invaders, they brought the English language with them, and its standing in the Arab world improved considerably with the development of commercial and educational relations with Britain and America. Consequently, a process of borrowing from English into Arabic started. It was encouraged by various factors, namely insufficient knowledge of their own language among Arabic speakers, the absence of a competent body of qualified scholars to deal with the problem of establishing e4ýivalentsj the lack of Arabic equivalents and the ignorance of such equivalents when they exist,. attraction of the English expression or image, love for the new and the strange, and a sense of inferiority. These factors were later augmented by the emergence of the mass-information media, which encouraged, and in certain cases relied on translation, mainly from English and employed translators whose Arabic and English were not idiomatic. On the other and there were factors that reduced borrowing, such as the religious and nationalist spirit which saw in borrowing a threat to the purity and continued vitality of the language, lack of emotional attachment to English, the phonological and morphological differences between the two languages, and the differences in the cultural backgrounds of the two nations which influence their modes of expression.

works such as Smart 1990, Hobrom 1996, Wiswal 2002, Gomaa 2007, Almoaily 2008, Naess 2008, Bakir 2010, and Alshammari 2010. Importantly, since GPA is spoken by a non-indigenous workforce over a wide geographical area in a multi-ethnic speech community, language variation seems inevitable. However, to date, there is no account of variation in GPA conditioned by substrate language or length of stay. Therefore, in this thesis I analyse the impact of the first language of the speakers and the number of years of residency in their location in the Gulf as potential factors conditioning language variation in GPA. The data-base for the study consists of interviews with sixteen informants from three linguistic backgrounds: Malayalam, Bengali, and Punjabi. Interviews were conducted in two cities in Saudi Arabia: Riyadh and Alkharj. Half of the data is produced by informants who have spent five or less years in the Gulf while the other half has spent ten or more years in the Gulf by the time they were interviewed. The analysis is based on ten morpho-syntactic phenomena: free or bound object or possessive pronoun, presence or absence of the Arabic definiteness marker, presence or absence of Arabic conjunction markers, presence or absence of the GPA copula, and presence or absence of agreement in the verb phrase and the noun phrase. Given the fact that most of the current theories on contact languages have been made on the basis of Indo-European language based pidgins and creoles, analysing the above features in an Arabic-based pidgin promises to be a great addition to the literature of pidgins and creoles. Results of this thesis show that both first language and number of years of stay in the Gulf seem to have little effect on my informants’ choices as regards the studied morpho-syntactic features. There is a significant adaptation to the system of Gulf Arabic (the lexifier language) only with respect to one feature: conjunction markers. This finding could be taken to support Universalist theories of the emergence of contact languages. However, some substratal effect can still be noticed in the data.

Studies of Arabic collocation have to date been highly influenced by the intensional approach (Evert, 2005: 16), where collocations are regarded as phraseological units which are semantically opaque and have a degree of fixedness. However, no studies have approached Arabic collocation from the neo-Firthian perspective, where collocations are seen as the co-occurrence of words within a certain distance, a directly observable and quantifiable phenomenon. This thesis investigates Arabic collocation from that perspective, in terms of textual meanings and discursive usage in media discourse. Doing this entails two interdependent levels of analysis. A) At the micro-level of analysis, collocations are investigated textually, using corpus linguistic methods, and applying Sinc1air's model of the Extended Lexical Unit (ELU). According to the ELU, a given lexical item is characterized syntagmatically and paradigmatically at different linguistic levels: lexical (collocation), syntactic (colligational patterns) semantic (semantic preferences), and pragmatic (semantic prosody). B) At the macro-level of analysis, collocations are taken beyond the boundaries of the text to a wider context of discourse, in order to decode the ideological meanings encoded in collocational and lexical choices. At this level, ideological uses of collocations are described and interpreted in the light of the underlying socio-political context, using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) methods and a framework of several discursive strategies to discover ideologically-motivated representati ons. The analysis is based on a nearly 100 million word tagged and lemmatized corpus, derived from the Egyptian newspaper Al-ahram and covering 10 years from 2000 to 2009. Two political abstract nouns are analyzed as a case study (huwiyya 'IDENTITY' and diimuqraaTiyya 'DEMOCRACY'), to explore their collocational behaviour and ideological usage in the media discourse in pre-revolutionary Egypt The analysis reveals that both huwiyya 'IDENTITY' and diimuqraaTiyya 'DEMOCRACY' have three meanings in this corpus: social, individual and conceptual for huwiyya, and political, social and conceptual for diimuqraaTiyya. Each meaning is textually realized in particular colligational patterns, and has distinct semantic preferences for particular lexical fields of collocates. Pragmatically, the two lemmata have positive and negative semantic prosodies as deduced from the co-textual collocates. The social meaning of huwiyya is associated with a positive prosody evoked from positive actions taken by a community or a group of people towards their identity, contrasting with a negative prosody when the identity is depicted as being lost or wiped out. The individual meaning has a negative prosody, as it is typically used in contexts relating to reporting accidents and investigating crimes. As for diimuqraaTiyya, it has a predominantly positive prosody, i.e. a collective moral/ideal value, as well as a negative prosody of unreality and allegation. By going beyond the microanalysis to explore the construction of ideology in discourse, the macro-analysis reveals that the Arab, national, Islamic and Jewish identities have negative prosodies and negative ideological representations, in contrast to the largely positively-presented Egyptian identity. Similarly, when democracy is referred to in co-texts including Mubarak, Egypt, the thenruling National Democratic Party, it is portrayed extremely positively; conversely democracy is derogated ideologically in co-texts including Islamists, opposition, America and Israel. This overall picture can be understood in the light of the identity of the Al-ahrarn newspaper as a pro-regime publication that propagandizes in accord with the ruling regime's policies and interests. The positive and negative portrayal of particular groups and ideals is in accord with the political preferences of Mubarak's regime. This thesis advances the study of collocation in Arabic theoretically and methodologically through: a) demonstrating the applicability the model of the Extended Lexical Unit (ELU) to Arabic collocation, with some required modifications due to the nature of Arabic morphosyntax, by exploring the collocational profile and textual meaning(s) of given lemmata in empirical data; and b) combining corpus linguistic and CDA methods in discovering the covert ideological meanings of overt collocations, and interpreting them contextually. It is a real advance for Arabic collocation study to use these methods to gain insights into collocational behaviour, as a linguistic phenomenon in real usage.

Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging is the process of labeling or classifying each word in written text with its grammatical category or part-of-speech, i.e. noun, verb, preposition, adjective, etc. It is the most common disambiguation process in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). POS tagging systems are often preprocessors in many NLP applications. The Arabic language has a valuable and an important feature, called diacritics, which are marks placed over and below the letters of the word. An Arabic text is partiallyvocalisedl when the diacritical mark is assigned to one or maximum two letters in the word. Diacritics in Arabic texts are extremely important especially at the end of the word. They help determining not only the correct POS tag for each word in the sentence, but also in providing full information regarding the inflectional features, such as tense, number, gender, etc. for the sentence words. They add semantic information to words which helps with resolving ambiguity in the meaning of words. Furthermore, diacritics ascribe grammatical functions to the words, differentiating the word from other words, and determining the syntactic position of the word in the sentence. 1. Vocalisation (also referred as diacritisation or vowelisation). This thesis presents a rule-based Part-of-Speech tagging system called AMT - short for Arabic Morphosyntactic Tagger. The main function of the AMT system is to assign the correct tag to each word in an untagged raw partially-vocalised Arabic corpus, and to produce a POS tagged corpus without using a manually tagged or untagged lexicon (dictionary) for training. Two different techniques were used in this work, the pattem-based technique and the lexical and contextual technique. The rules in the pattem-based technique technique are based on the pattern of the testing word. A novel algorithm, Pattern-Matching Algorithm (PMA), has been designed and introduced in this work. The aim of this algorithm is to match the testing word with its correct pattern in pattern lexicon. The lexical and contextual technique on the other hand is used to assist the pattembased technique technique to assign the correct tag to those words not have a pattern to follow. The rules in the lexical and contextual technique are based on the character(s), the last diacritical mark, the word itself, and the tags of the surrounding words. The importance of utilizing the diacritic feature of the Arabic language to reduce the lexical ambiguity in POS tagging has been addressed. In addition, a new Arabic tag set and a new partially-vocalised Arabic corpus to test AMT have been compiled and presented in this work. The AMT system has achieved an average accuracy of 91 %.

This study uses a constraint-based framework to investigate some assimilatory processes in one variety of Libyan Arabic. This is the variety spoken by the inhabitants of the city of Misrata, henceforth referred to as Misrata Libyan Arabic (MLA). Some of the assimilatory processes are so closely related that they can be accounted for using similar constraints. In this respect, the OCP is shown to play an important role in some of the processes. For example, assimilations of /l/ of the definite article prefix and the detransitivising prefix /t-/ are triggered by an OCP violation on the coronal tier. The OCP may have blocking or triggering effects; the two assimilatory processes just referred to are instances of the OCP triggering effects. On the other hand, a blocking effect not involving the OCP involves guttural consonants, which block voicing assimilation of the imperfective prefix /t-/. This blocking of voicing assimilation will be shown to provide support to some researchers’ proposal to classify gutturals as sonorant segments. Despite this blocking effect, some guttural segments devoice before suffixes that begin with /h/ and simultaneously cause this /h/ to agree with them in place of articulation. Lateral assimilation has been claimed to be restricted solely to /l/ of the definite article /ʔil-/. However, some of the forms introduced in chapter (3) demonstrate that /l/ in the homophonous morpheme /ʔil-/ ‘for/to’ may assimilate totally to a following coronal sonorant. The alveolar nasal /n/ assimilates partially (in place) to the obstruents /b/, /k/, /g/ and /f/. The segment /n/ assimilates totally to the sonorant consonants it immediately precedes. Partial assimilation takes place both within the same phonological word and across a word boundary. Total assimilation, by contrast, occurs only when two words ii are involved. This is because /n/ cannot be followed by a sonorant consonant word-internally.

The main body of the thesis consists of three parts with fifteen chapters in all. The Linguistic approach in the first part is based on the Standard Theory as presented in Chomsky and Halle (1968). The other two parts offer a nonlinear analysis of the phonology and morphology of Moroccan Arabic. The two most important versions of nonlinear theory are the Metrical and the Autosegmental with the topics of prosodic structure and interaction between prosody and phonology included in the former. First Part (Chapters I - V), which is an. introductory part, consists of a historical inquiry into the origins and nature of Modern Sedentary dialects of Arabic. The inquiry centers around elucidation of two major areas: - The linguistic situation of Arabia (3rd - 6th C.A.D.). - The phonological and morphological features of the spoken Koine from which Modern Sedentary dialects are believed to have developed. Second Part (Chapters VI - IX) is a metrical analysis of the prosodic structure in Arabic. It examines the interaction between stress and syllable weight, along the lines presented in Liberman and Prince (1977). A revised version of this theory based on works by Halle and Vergnaud (1978), McCarthy (1979) and Hayes (1979) is applied to word-stress assignment in the Moroccan Arabic dialect of Rabat. This part also gives a metrical representation of syllable-initial bi-consonant clusters, and offers a solution to some phonotactic constraints of Rabati. Third Part (Chapters X - XV) consists of two major sections. Section one (Chapters X - XII) analyses the importance of prosody in the application of certain phonological rules such as Syncope and Epenthesis. An attempt is also made to account for the dual behaviour of geminates. Section two (Chapters XIII - XV) shows how McCarthy's (1981b) version of Autosegmental theory can be applied to some aspects of Nonconcatenative morphology of Moroccan Arabic. It attempts to describe the permutations of consonants and vowels in the formation of Triliteral and Quadriliteral verb classes.

This thesis proposes a minimalist analysis that accounts for a number of word-orderrelated issues in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Jordanian Arabic (JA). Assuming Chomsky's (2005) feature inheritance model, the thesis investigates the issues of Case, the interaction between subject positions and verbal agreement in addition to object movement. In verb-subject-object word orders, subjects are invariably nominative; the Case value on the postverbal subject is an outcome of an Agree relation between these subjects and T, the head of Tense Phrase (TP), which inherits its feature from the complementiser. Chapter four argues that the Case variability on the preverbal subject in subject-verb-object structures is dependent on the type of the complementiser. The complementiser which introduces subject-verb-object clauses has a lexical Case feature that is not interpretable on T, hence T does not inherit this feature. Consequently, the lexical Case feature of the complementiser in subjectverb- object structures is discharged under a local Agree relation between the complementiser and the preverbal noun phrase which is raised from a lower position. It is also claimed in chapter four that the structure of zero copula sentences contains a light Noun Phrase (nP) functional projection that compares to the light Verb Phrase (vP) functional projection in verbal sentences. Case on the nominal complements in zero copula sentences is valued under an Agree relation with the features of n, the head of nP. Chapter five deals with verbal agreement and subject positions; it claims that the supposed number marker, which appears as a clitic on the verb in subject-verbobject word orders, is in fact a spell out of the copy that is left behind the fronted subject. In MSA, the fronted subject undergoes topic movement to the specifier position of Topic Phrase (TopP). By contrast, in JA, the fronted subject is located in the specifier position of TP. JA differs from MSA in that it allows the verb to undergo topic movement to the specifier position of TopP across the subject in the specifier position of TP. Finally, the phenomenon of object displacement and pronominal object cliticisation in MSA is investigated in chapter six. It is argued that verb-object-subject word orders are derived by focus movement of the object from its base position across the subject to an outer specifier position of vP. It is claimed that focus movement affects nominal objects as well as pronominal object clitics. In particular, it is claimed that pronominal object cliticisation onto the verb does not take place in Verb Phrase (VP). Rather, object cliticisation takes place after the spell out of vP phase.