This study deals with the morphological structure of one of Libyan Arabic varieties called al-Jabal Dialect of Libyan Arabic (JDLA). The main concern of this study is the morphological component of JDLA though a general overview of the phonological system along with major phonological processes have been presented and accounted for. Such a presentation of the phonological processes is justified by the fact that phonology and morphology do interplay greatly in many points in the grammar. This dissertation is the first study of JDLA. The presentation of this dissertation is conducted in the following way. Chapter I is an introduction. Chapter II deals in brief with the phonological system of the dialect. This includes the consonants and vowels, syllable structure, stress rules and the major phonological processes of JDLA. Phonological processes include syncope, epenthesis, assimilation, metathesis, vowel length, vowel harmony, etc. Chapter III introduces the morphology of verbs where the derivation and inflection of triliteral and quadriliteral verbs are presented in detail. This includes the derivational and inflectional processes of sound, doubled, hollow and defective verbs ... etc. JDLA morphology is a root-based morphology where different morphological categories are produced through the interdigitation of roots and vowels which might be accompanied by affixes. Such a process is a very productive method in word creation as has been pointed out in the main body of this work. Chapter IV is devoted to the morphology of nouns. The derivation and inflection of verbal nouns, instance nouns, unit nouns, feminine nouns, instrumental nouns, locative nouns, etc. are elaborated upon. Chapter V concerns with the morphology of adjectives. The derivational and inflectional processes of verbal adjectives, positive adjectives, elative adjectives and adjectives of color and defect are introduced and accounted for. Chapter VI deals with pronouns where independent and suffixed personal pronouns along with other pronouns have been dealt with. Chapter VII concludes the study by presenting the salient features of JDLA as well as recommendations for future research.

Using information retrieval systems to gain access to documents in languages other than English is becoming an increasingly significant problem. Rules, theories, algorithms, and retrieval methods designed and developed for English and other morphologically similar languages may or may not apply in the linguistic environments of other languages. The problem is particularly acute in languages that differ radically from English on account of morphological rules. This thesis compares the effects of two indexing and retrieval techniques (stemming and root retrieval) on information retrieval in Arabic through an exploratory study of the handling of Arabic words by an English search engine. It also investigates how best to adapt existing English-language information retrieval systems for use with Arabic-language texts, and specifically to process words and their morphological variations. Search experiments, using 2000 Arabic documents and 40 Arabic search terms (nouns), were conducted with a Web search engine developed for English, AltaVista, to compare the performances of stemming and root retrieval and to investigate the possibility of adapting this engine for use with Arabic text. The results of the experiments show that more effective retrieval can be accomplished through stemming, and that it is possible to adapt the engine for use with Arabic without the need to develop root-retrieval features.

The present work is mainly concerned with a description of the morphological and syntactic analyses of the predicative aspectual phenomena in Modern Standard Arabic using Axiomatic Functionalism as its theoretical framework. The thesis consists of an introduction, three major parts, and a conclusion. The introduction deals with a brief overview of the Axiomatic Functionalist theory. Part one, which comprises four chapters, offers a brief account of the theoretical background of this work as well as presenting the predicative (verbal and non-verbal) aspectual phenomena in MSA. Chapter I discusses the term 'aspect', and the relation between lexical and grammatical aspect. Chapter II discusses the Arabic language, particularly the category of 'aspect'. Chapter III discusses the interaction between punctuality and aspect. Chapter IV is exclusively devoted to methodology; it explains an explanation of the essential and relevant theoretical notions in grammar, uniting the description to the theory. It also provides a step-by-step application of successive criteria for discriminating between morphological complexes and syntactic complexes. The second part (Chaps. V & VI), deals with morphological analysis. Chapter V analyses the category of verb in Arabic. For this purpose the following paradigms are set up: Verb-root, Aspect, Voice, Person, Gender, and Number. Each of these contains monemes which which are constituents of the verbal entity. These monemes commute with each other yielding a difference in the message conveyed. The chapter concludes that entities of the verb category in Arabic may contain the constituent monemes verb-root, perfective, imperfective, active, passive, first person, second person, third person, masculine, feminine, singular, dual, and plural. Chapter VI deals with the realisational as pect of the constituent monemes of the complex pleremes in chapter V. It also deals with the distribution of the allomorphs of the constituent monemes in question. Part three (Chaps. VII - IX), deals with the syntactic description of the aspectual phenomena in MSA. Chapter VII sets up the distributional unit (model) which accounts for the relations within the VPB syntagm. This chapter tests the adequacy of the model by establishing all the VPB syntagms which map onto it. These syntagms vary according to the type of the verbal nucleus in each of them, (transitive or intransitive and of what kind). It further deals with types of non-verbal nucleus I and the realisations of the predicative based syntagms (verbal and non-verbal). Chapter VIII deals in detail with the syntactic relations within the predicative syntagms. It also deals with the syntactic structures of various as pectual phenomena in MSA. Chapter IX discusses the syntactic relation within the functional syntagm in MSA which may form an immediate constituent in a predicative based syntagm. A final brief 'Conclusion' points out the need for further research and development in Axiomatic Functionalism in the field of "semantic syntagm-analysis".

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The field of Information Retrieval recognizes the importance of stemming in improving retrieval effectiveness. This same tool, when applied to searches conducted in the Arabic language, increases the relevancy of documents returned and expands searches to encompass the general meaning of a word instead of the word itself. Since the Arabic language relies mainly on triconsonantal roots for verb forms and derives nouns by adding affixes, words with similar consonants are closely related in meaning. Stemming allows a search term to focus more on the meaning of a term and closely related terms and less on specific character matches. This paper discusses the strengths of light stemming, the best techniques, and components for algorithmic affix-based stemmers used in keyword searching in the Arabic language.

The research presented in this dissertation adopts an empirical Saussurean structuralist approach to elucidating the true meaning of the verb patterns characterised formally by vowel lengthening in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The verbal system as a whole is examined in order to place the patterns of interest (III and VI) in context, the complexities of Arabic verbal morphology are explored and the challenges revealed by previous attempts to draw links between form and meaning are presented. An exhaustive dictionary survey is employed to provide quantifiable data to empirically test the largely accepted view that the vowel lengthening patterns have mutual/reciprocal meaning. Finding the traditional explanation inadequate and prone to too many exceptions, alternative commonalities of meaning are similarly investigated. Whilst confirming the detransitivising function of the ta- prefix which derives pattern VI from pattern III, analysis of valency data also precludes transitivity as a viable explanation for pattern III meaning compared with the base form. Examination of formally similar morphology in certain nouns leads to the intuitive possibility that vowel lengthening has aspectual meaning. A model of linguistic aspect is investigated for its applicability to MSA and used to isolate the aspectual feature common to the majority of pattern III and pattern VI verbs, which is determined to be atelicity. A set of verbs which appear to be exceptional in that they are not attributable to atelic aspectual categories is found to be characterised by inceptive meaning and a three-phase model of event time structure is developed to include an inceptive verbal category, demonstrating that these verbs too are atelic. Thus the form-meaning relationship which is discovered is that the vowel lengthening verbal patterns in Modern Standard Arabic have atelic aspectual meaning.