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.

This thesis examines one of the most intriguing and much studied phenomena in Semitic known as the broken plural formation. It has a twofold goal. It documents the diverse shapes of broken plurals in the Muscat dialect of Omani Arabic. Furthermore, it provides a formal analysis to the shapes and vocalism contained in these word forms within Optimality Theory framework (Prince and Smolensky 1993; McCarthy and Prince 1993a & 1993b). Following proposals by McCarthy (2000), this thesis assumes that the distinction between the singulars and broken plural shapes is better represented as 'affixed mora (p)' attached at a certain locus in broken plural forms. The analysis of the vocalism characterizing broken plural forms addresses two distinct types of fixed vocalism: phonological and specified. Fixed vocalism is demonstrated to result from an interaction between conflicting alignment and CrispEdge constraints (It6 and Mester 1999) together with *Place markedness constraints.

The overall purpose of this study is to correlate features of compliments and compliment responses in Jordanian Arabic with social variables including gender, age, and traditionalism. This research project sets out to investigate the following questions:1. Do men and women give and respond to compliments differently? If so, how?2. Do people of different age groups give and respond to compliments differently? Ifso, how?3. Do traditional and non-traditional people give and respond to compliments differently? If so, how?Naturally occurring examples of compliments/ compliment responses were gathered by 10 fieldworkers in the research site of Irbid, Jordan. The dependent variables that were investigated include the topics, syntactic patterns, positive semantic carriers, the format of compliments, and the types of compliment responses.The results indicate that although the complimenting behavior of Jordanian people is similar in some ways, the social variables do correlate with some systematic differences. Specifically, people who share the same gender, age, or level of traditionalism compliment each other more frequently than persons who differ in any of these categories. Moreover, females and young people primarily use the following complimenting categories: compliments on appearance, explicit compliments, exclamatory syntactic patterns, and compliment plus explanation. Women and men differ in using compliment responses in that the women prefer questions and accounts compared to the men who employ more blessings and disagreements. Explanations forthese variations are discussed, based on the functions of compliments and the nature of the Jordanian culture.This research contributes to socio-pragmatics by analyzing variation in the use of complimenting in a relatively homogenous speech community. It tackles some culture-specific features of politeness and indirectness that are crucial to any politeness theory. The research also serves pedagogical purposes in that the application of its results in the classroom will help to reduce the communication breakdowns often experienced by L2 learners. With respect to methodology, the study provides adequate data to further test the validity of natural data collection in the investigation of speech acts. / Department of English

Italian loadwords in Libyan Arabic have not received the attention and concern they deserve despite their number, high frequency, and wide use by all Libyans at all levels for more than one and a half centuries. This study attempts to record as many Italian loanwords in Libyan Arabic as possible as reported by the Libyan students and their spouses in the United States, to establish a linguistic criterion for the identification of these loanwords in Libyan Arabic, to determine the semantic adaptations they have undergone, and to verify their recognition and use by the students and their spouses. A list of 1000 words suspected to be Italian loanwords were collected through direct observation of Libyan speech, including my own as a native speaker of the dialect, by use of informants and intensive reading. The words were then checked against their possible native models in Italian through the use of Italian dictionaries and consultation with native Italian speakers, most of whom are linguists or language teachers. The list was reduced to 682 words, which were used in the questionnaire sent to 290 Libyan students and their spouses in the United States. From the 148 replies to the questionnaire, it is found that on the average 75% of the respondents know all the 684 words and 58% of them use them. About 82% of the loanwords have literary or colloquial Arabic equivalents. About 55% had presumably entered Libyan Arabic or Libyan Arabic speakers were exposed to them during the 1911-1970 period, which marks the Italian occupation of Libya, 5% between 1832-1910, and 5% between 1970-1985. About 93% of the Italian loanwords are nouns, 7% adjectives, 1% verbs, 0.8% adverbs, and 0.5% interjections. Meanings of most of the loanwords are more pervasive in Italian than in Libyan Arabic. It was also found that most of the loanwords had adopted Arabic grammatical rules for tense formation and inflection for number or gender.

Mode of access: World Wide Web. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 237-249). / Electronic reproduction. / Also available by subscription via World Wide Web / xv, 249 leaves, bound ill., maps (1 col.) 29 cm

This thesis discusses different approaches to machine translation (MT) from Dialectal Arabic (DA) to English. These approaches handle the varying stages of Arabic dialects in terms of types of available resources and amounts of training data. The overall theme of this work revolves around building dialectal resources and MT systems or enriching existing ones using the currently available resources (dialectal or standard) in order to quickly and cheaply scale to more dialects without the need to spend years and millions of dollars to create such resources for every dialect. Unlike Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), DA-English parallel corpora is scarcely available for few dialects only. Dialects differ from each other and from MSA in orthography, morphology, phonology, and to some lesser degree syntax. This means that combining all available parallel data, from dialects and MSA, to train DA-to-English statistical machine translation (SMT) systems might not provide the desired results. Similarly, translating dialectal sentences with an SMT system trained on that dialect only is also challenging due to different factors that affect the sentence word choices against that of the SMT training data. Such factors include the level of dialectness (e.g., code switching to MSA versus dialectal training data), topic (sports versus politics), genre (tweets versus newspaper), script (Arabizi versus Arabic), and timespan of test against training. The work we present utilizes any available Arabic resource such as a preprocessing tool or a parallel corpus, whether MSA or DA, to improve DA-to-English translation and expand to more dialects and sub-dialects. The majority of Arabic dialects have no parallel data to English or to any other foreign language. They also have no preprocessing tools such as normalizers, morphological analyzers, or tokenizers. For such dialects, we present an MSA-pivoting approach where DA sentences are translated to MSA first, then the MSA output is translated to English using the wealth of MSA-English parallel data. Since there is virtually no DA-MSA parallel data to train an SMT system, we build a rule-based DA-to-MSA MT system, ELISSA, that uses morpho-syntactic translation rules along with dialect identification and language modeling components. We also present a rule-based approach to quickly and cheaply build a dialectal morphological analyzer, ADAM, which provides ELISSA with dialectal word analyses. Other Arabic dialects have a relatively small-sized DA-English parallel data amounting to a few million words on the DA side. Some of these dialects have dialect-dependent preprocessing tools that can be used to prepare the DA data for SMT systems. We present techniques to generate synthetic parallel data from the available DA-English and MSA- English data. We use this synthetic data to build statistical and hybrid versions of ELISSA as well as improve our rule-based ELISSA-based MSA-pivoting approach. We evaluate our best MSA-pivoting MT pipeline against three direct SMT baselines trained on these three parallel corpora: DA-English data only, MSA-English data only, and the combination of DA-English and MSA-English data. Furthermore, we leverage the use of these four MT systems (the three baselines along with our MSA-pivoting system) in two system combination approaches that benefit from their strengths while avoiding their weaknesses. Finally, we propose an approach to model dialects from monolingual data and limited DA-English parallel data without the need for any language-dependent preprocessing tools. We learn DA preprocessing rules using word embedding and expectation maximization. We test this approach by building a morphological segmentation system and we evaluate its performance on MT against the state-of-the-art dialectal tokenization tool.

The Qatifi dialect of Arabic is spoken by a minority group located principally in Qatif, near Dhahran, in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. Codeswitching in the Qatifi community describes the alternation, within discourse, between two local codes, such as switching from the Qatifi Arabic to either the Qatifi secret G, S, and T languages or to Classical and Modern Arabic, on the one hand. On the other hand, it describes the alternation between local and foreign codes, such as switching from the Qatifi Arabic to English, Farsi, and Broken Arabic pidgin.The Qatifi speakers frequently use the G, S, and T secret languages, which represent phonological variations in Qatifi Arabic according to particular rules. These secret languages are used by the Qatifi people to establish political solidarity, to secure social norms, or to insure discretion.Codeswitching from the Qatifi dialect to other local or foreign codes also affirms the social identity and personal pride of individuals taking part in informal conversation. It is important therefore to understand the social constraints of the society where it is found, and how it works within the linguistic rules of the source language and the mainstream communicative system. Codeswitching as spoken by the Qatifi middle class community identifies particular member of this minority group.The aim of this thesis is to explain codeswitching occurring between theQatifi dialect of Arabic and other language varieties. Using data drawn mainly from personal interviews with Qatifi natives, I investigate the type of code used in variable conversational settings and the interaction among the Qatifi trusted or non-suspicious members. / Department of English

A phenomenon of language contact between different speech communities is that of code switching which is a result of language contact between speakers of diverse language(s) and/or dialect(s). The aim of this thesis is to quantitatively and qualitatively detail the grammatical outcomes of intra-sentential code switching in natural parsing by bilingual speakers of Moroccan Arabic and English in the UK and to assess the way in which the Matrix Language Frame Model (MLF) (Myers-Scotton 1993b, 2002) is a suitable linguistic model for bilingual discourse. Such natural switching is highly regularized and syntactic features are maintained through normal grammatical constraints as will be detailed. A description of grammatical approaches to code switching is outlined with focus on one particular model, the Matrix Language Frame the concept of which was first pioneered by Joshi (1985) and elaborated upon in further detail by Myers-Scotton (1993b, 2002). I also draw upon the Minimalist model MacSwan (1999) for further analysis of inter-language parameters and language universals with regard to constraints on code switching as well as comparisons made with the Monolingual Structure Approach (Boumans, 1998). It is not the aim of this thesis to advocate a one-size-fits-all approach to constraints on code switching as this has proved to be the Achilles heel of all theoretical approaches to code switching over the last few decades (Pfaff 1979, Poplack 1980, Di Sciullo, Muysken & Singh 1986, Bentahila & Davies 1983) but to validate and corroborate the viability of the Matrix Language Frame Model. Natural data of Moroccan Arabic and English code switched discourse collated for this thesis provide further empirical support required to test the validity of the Matrix Language Frame model well as providing a quantitative database for further research. I advocate my own set of eleven generalizations pertaining to intra-sentential code switching and highlight a new emerging speech style amongst second and third generation speakers I have termed Reactive Syntax where it becomes evident that innovative speech styles and syntactic strings of utterances highlight creativity amongst these generational groups. This thesis concludes with an evaluation of the data collated together with an examination of the suitability of the Matrix Language Frame Model and suggestions for further research.

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Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished