The negation system in Modern Egyptian Colloquial Arabic does not follow an obvious set of rules. The particle that negates most verbal predicates also negates nominal predicates, and the particle that negates most nominal predicates also negates verbal predicates. By examining the behavior of these particles over time and comparing them to negation systems in other languages, it is possible to see the reasons for this complicated negation system. / text

This dissertation is a study of negative concord in Levantine Arabic (Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria), where negative concord is the failure of an n-word to express negative meaning distinctly when in syntagm with another negative expression . A set of n-words is identified, including the never-words <ʔɛbadan> and <bɪlmarra> "never, not once, not at all," the negative minimizers <hawa> and <qɛšal> "nothing," and the negative scalar focus particle <wala> "not (even) (one), not a (single)." Each can be used to express negation in sentence fragments and other constructions with elliptical interpretations, such as gapping and coordination. Beyond that, the three categories differ syntactically and semantically. I present analyses of these expressions that treat them as having different morphological and semantic properties. The data support an ambiguity analysis for wala-phrases, and a syntactic analysis of it with never-words, indicating that a single, uniform theory of negative concord should be rejected for Levantine Arabic. The dissertation is the first such work to explicitly identify negative concord in Levantine Arabic, and to provide a detailed survey and analysis of it. The description includes subtle points of variation between regional varieties of Levantine, as well as in depth analysis of the usage of n-words. It also adds a large new data set to the body of data that has been reported on negative concord, and have several implications for theories on the subject. The dissertation also makes a contribution to computational linguistics as applied to Arabic, because the analyses are couched in Combinatory Categorial Grammar, a formalism that is used both for linguisic theorizing as well as for a variety of practical applications, including text parsing and text generaration. The semantic generalizations reported here are also important for practical computational tasks, because they provide a way to correctly calculate the negative or positive polarity of utterances in a negative concord language, which is essential for computational tasks such as machine translation or sentiment analysis. / text

On s’intéresse dans cette thèse à la relation entre le degré de conscience qu’ont les locuteurs de la variation dans le cas de certaines variables sociolinguistiques à Beyrouth [et les appréciations rattachées à chacune de leurs réalisations lorsqu’elles sont saillantes], et la distribution sociale de chacune de leurs variantes. Dans un premier temps, sont présentées les représentations rattachées aux stéréotypes et traits saillants perçus par les locuteurs. Les deuxième et troisième parties du travail présentent l’emploi et la répartition sociolinguistique de dix de ces stéréotypes et traits saillants, ainsi que de quatre autres variables. L’étude de la variation et des représentations rattachées à certaines variantes se base sur un corpus de quarante-sept entretiens et conversations menés auprès de locuteurs aux profils variés. Il ressort de cette étude qu’une koïnisation est en cours à Beyrouth, en conséquence du contact dialectal entre les variétés parlées par les migrants et les variétés originellement parlées dans la ville. Cette koïnisation se fait par la perte de leurs traits saillants à la fois par les migrants, et par les résidents originels de la ville. En contrepartie, la variation observée dans le cas d’autres variables sociolinguistiques, dont l’emploi est corrélé à des facteurs sociaux comme le sexe, l’âge, l’appartenance communautaire (ou religieuse) et le niveau d’éducation, montre que les tendances différenciatrices entre les locuteurs sur la base de ces quatre critères sont, pour le moins, dynamiques, et que certaines d’entre elles vont croissant. / This thesis explores the relationship between the salience of, and social values attributed to, some sociolinguistic variables in Beirut, and the social distribution of each of their variants. It first presents the social values attributed by speakers to the stereotypes and to other salient features they perceive. In its second and third parts, it concentrates on the social distribution of two stereotypes, eight salient features, and four other variables. The study is mainly based on forty-seven interviews and conversations, and the speakers that were met had various profiles. One of the findings of the study is that the koineization process resulting from the contact between the dialects spoken by migrants and those spoken by ‘genuine’ Beirutis leads to the loss of distinctive features in both groups. On the other hand, it appears from the distribution and evolution of a set of ‘non local’ variables, that some of the linguistic differences related to such social factors as gender, age, religious and communal affiliation, and educational level seem to be, for the least, very dynamic, if not growing with time.

Arabic language ideology that views the colloquial as a threat to the standard language and fears a public role for the colloquial register remained prevalent throughout much of the twentieth century. Yet, in late nineteenth-century Egypt, the Nahda project of disseminating knowledge to ‘the masses’ gave rise to several journals that found a public role for Ammiyya, introducing it into the realm of written knowledge. This study analyzes the processes of introducing Ammiyya into the written realm and the subsequent attempt at reeling the register back in from the public sphere. Through a framework of the sociolinguistic analysis of style and the process of iconization, Part I analyzes Abdallah al-Nadim’s use of language variation in his journal, al-Ustaadh, and how it aided in sorting out contradiction between ideology that hailed the standard as the suitable public register and practice that conceded a role to the colloquial. This study argues that even as his journal published didactic dialogues in Ammiyya, Nadim’s language practice chipped away at the prospect of a sustained literary role for the colloquial through the use of ‘styles’ that aligned the standard with authority and a keen understanding of the modernity project and through indexing the colloquial with the backward realm of uneducated women. Through the framework of the process of ‘erasure', Part II analyzes linguistic practices aimed at reeling the colloquial back in from the realm of written knowledge. It demonstrates Nadim’s efforts - near the end of the publication of his journal - to erase the notion that an educated Egyptian would have any use for the register. Nadim removed the salient features of Ammiyya from his dialogues and scolded his interlocutors who displayed their backwardness through the continued use of the features. Late nineteenth- century works, such as Hasan Tawfiq’s Usuul al-Kalimaat al-Ammiyya, represent a continuation of the ideology-practice dialectic from Nadim’s attempted erasure of the colloquial. However, whereas Nadim erased salient features of the colloquial from his writings, these works attempted to trace Ammiyya terms back to their assumed Fusha origins, with the aim of unifying the language by erasing the register. / text

This thesis examines selected poems of Egyptian writer Ṣalāḥ Ǧāhīn. The study includes the author's approach to portraying the ideological, political, cultural, and socio-economic aspects of patriotism and translations of his poems. A part of this study is devoted to the problem of colloquial poetry within modern Arabic literature. Key words: Ṣalāḥ Ǧāhīn, colloquial language, poetry, zaǧal

DIPLOMOVÁ PRÁCE SERIAL VERB CONSTRUCTIONS IN ARABIC Konstrukce sériových sloves v arabštině Bc. Adam Pospíšil Abstract The aim of this thesis is to investigate multi-verb structures in Egyptian Arabic (EA) which show some characteristics attributed to the typological notion of serial verb constructions (SVC). After providing a preliminary definition of an EA-specific SVC notion, the author examines a substantial quantity of data from EA, gathered mostly on social networks, in order to describe the syntactic and semantic behavíour of constructions which are yielded by such definition. Finally, the results of this investigation are considered from the perspective of the definition of SVC as a comparative concept provided by Haspelmath (2016), so as to view the observed constructions in a typological context.

La thèse étudie d’un point de vue sociolinguistique la rencontre de la langue parlée et de la langue écrite, surtout à travers ce que nous avons appelé la classicisation, dans la production romanesque du syrien Ħalīm Barakāt, auteur sur lequel s’est fixé notre choix après de multiples lectures de romans proche-orientaux contemporains. Ħalīm Barakāt est l’auteur de 18 romans et d’une cinquantaine d’essais, en arabe et en anglais, sur la société et la culture. Nous avons choisi de comparer cette rencontre dans quatre de ses romans. Chaque roman est traité dans un chapitre. Dans les deux premiers chapitres sont étudiés les romans les plus récents : “Tā’er al- ħūm” un roman autobiographique écrit en 1987 et réédité en 2007 et “Ināna wan-nahr” une oeuvre mélangeant non seulement les langages et leurs registres mais aussi fantaisie entre mythes locaux et réalité. Puis sont étudiés dans les deux chapitres suivants les deux romans écrits dans les années soixante et soixante-dix : “Sittat Ayyām” qui raconte une histoire d’amour entre deux personnages de religions différentes pendant une guerre, et “Al-raħīl bayna Alsahm wal-watar”, un roman illustré par une vingtaine d’histoires et de contes choisis dans tout le monde arabe et racontés par des personnages représentant la jeunesse arabe dans les années soixante-dix. Dans l’introduction nous proposons un plan pour le travail, qui est fondé surtout sur la traduction en français de tous les extraits arabes choisis pour l’analyse sociolinguistique. Pour bien cerner la rencontre de la langue parlée et de la langue écrite nous avons décidé de relever tout ce qui est proverbe et figements lexicaux propres à une langue comme à l’autre et nous avons gardé des passages écrits entièrement en langue standard ou en langue dialectale pour montrer la différence entre ces textes et ceux qui sont hybrides. En ce qui concerne les passages écrits dans une langue hétérogène, nous proposons des termes linguistiques que nous définissons et auxquels nous avons recours tout au long des commentaires qui interviennent entre les tableaux où sont donnés les extraits choisis en regard de leur traduction. La conclusion reprend et synthétise les principaux résultats de la recherche. / This sociolinguistical study is about the encounter of spoken and written language, focusing on the unique phenomenon of the ‘classicisation’, a phenomenon which emerged in modern Arab literature by converting the spoken everyday language into a written form. After long readings into Arab Middle Eastern novelists we have chosen to take as example four novels of Syrian novelist Ħalīm Barakāt, who has authored over 18 books and some fifty essays in both Arabic and English on society and culture. We categorized our study into four chapters; we have chosen to begin with the two most recent ones then the chronologically older ones. The first chapter concentrates on the novel: “Tā’er al- ħūm” which describes the author’s journey alongside his wife to the American mountain side while he remembers his old days in his hometown Kafroun. The second chapter is all about “Ināna wan-nahr”, a love story loaded with mythological references and different religion-related social problems. The third chapter studies “Sittat Ayyām” a tale about an imaginary Arab Middle Eastern village throughout a devastating war. The fourth chapter takes as example some stories told by Arab youth from all over the Arabic world, in “Al-raħīl bayna Al-sahm wal-watar”. In the introduction we suggested some definitions then we relied upon them to integrate the analysis between the lines of the selected passages each time the language register changes. We presented the samples and the translation to French and we focused our analysis on examples that define the register change such as proverbs and expressions, dialectal and classic and common ones, and regional songs and sometimes purely classical-language written passages. In the conclusion we tried to summarize the main results of the research.