Should we analyse Arabic morphology in terms of a morpheme-based approach or in terms of a stem-based approach? This is the question which has figured prominently in morphological debate in recent years, especially in Semitic linguistics with ablaut-rich inflectional systems. This study provides a novel synchronic account to Transitional Libyan Arabic morphology, using a stem-based approach that assesses the morphomicity (Maiden, 2009, p.45) of stem alternations in the verb inflectional paradigm. This work focuses on the role of stem alternations in defining inflectional paradigmatic complexity in relation to implicative relations and inflection classes within the stem-space and principal parts morphological approaches. Following Bonami and Boyé’s (2002) approach to stem alternations in French, we define an inheritance hierarchy for TLA morphomic verb stems and show how this effectively identifies a set of inflection classes in the absence of affixal allomorphy. Within Stump and Finkel (2013) principal parts model, TLA inflection class membership can be determined by principal parts as indexed stems and/or as substems. The scale of the complexity of TLA inflectional system is also measured using the Principal-Parts Analyzer (PPA) computational tool. TLA conjugations reveal a synchronic morphomic patterning which shows sensitivity to extramorphological factors. The TLA semi-autonomous morphology is reflected by stem referencing features that provide the base for stem indexing possibilities which in turn can define TLA inflectional classes in the absence of the affix allomorphy. The results of principal parts analysis reveal that verb inflectional complexity of TLA as a Semitic language is as morphologically complex as concatenative stem based systems, posing serious empirical problems for any justifications for a unique distinctive non-concatenative morpheme-based account.

Nonword repetition has received great attention in the last three decades due to its ability to distinguish between the performance of children with language impairment and their typically developing peers and due to its correlation with variety of language abilities, especially vocabulary skills. This study investigates early phonological skills, as represented by nonword repetition (NWR), in TD Gulf Arabic speaking children and those with language impairment and tries to examine findings in relation to two important NWR hypotheses, namely the phonological short term memory account (PSTM, Gathercole& Baddeley, 1990a) and the linguistic account of Snowling, Chiat & Hulme (1991). In the first experiment, a new Arabic word and nonword test (WNRep) was developed and conducted with 44 TD children and a clinical group (CL) that consisted of 15 children with language impairment. The participants’ ages were between two and four years old. The results show that the TD group scored significantly higher than the CL group on the WNRep and across one, two and three syllable words/nonwords and that NWR scores correlated significantly with receptive and expressive vocabulary tests. Apart from its ability to differentiate between TD and those with language impairment, NWR results revealed significant differences in groups’ performance even on one syllable word and nonwords, which differs from findings in other languages. These results raise questions about whether these findings relate to the characteristic root and pattern morphology in Arabic. Therefore, the second experiment in chapter 5 was conducted to investigate the effects of roots and patterns on TD children’s repetition skills and their relation to receptive and expressive vocabulary tests. A root and pattern nonword repetition test (RAP-NWR) was developed to measure this effect. The RAP-NWR consisted of three different types of root and pattern combinations (real root and nonpattern nonwords, real pattern and nonroot nonwords and nonpattern and nonroot nonwords). All 89 participants were TD Gulf Arabic speaking children aged two to seven years old and divided into six age bands. Results showed that these children’s repetitions were sensitive to the presence of roots but not patterns and that RAP-NWR scores were significantly correlated with both vocabulary tests. Findings from both studies show that while phonological storage may explain some of the results of children’s performance on NWR, there are a myriad of phonological and morphological factors that could have significant effects on NWR, such as the effects of roots and patterns, and it seems that roots more important role to play as it roots awareness emerges earlier than pattern awareness. Based on these findings, clinical utility of root and pattern NWR tests is discussed and further investigations of effects of roots and patterns on NWR are recommended.

This study provides description and analysis of some verbal complementation patterns in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA), namely the Auxiliary /kaan/, Causative /xalla/, phasal verbs and modals. Each verb is represented by a set of sentences extracted from a 5 million word corpus of ECA online texts that was built for the purpose of the current study using the Sketch Engine tool. These verbal complements are described and analysed within the principles of LFG syntactic theory, and represented in a grammar fragment implemented using the XLE tool. The analysis shows that both tense and aspect can be expressed verbs in ECA, where in simple tense forms the verb carries tense only, while in compound tense, the main predicate marks tense and occupies I while the following lexical verb marks grammatical aspect and occupies V. The bi- prefix marks present tense on verbs in I and imperfect aspect on verbs in V, as well as a HAB/PROG feature. The bare Imperfective verb form is treated as a non-finite verb in ECA, where it can not occupy I and is marked by VFORM=BARE. All of the verbal constructions analysed are bi-clausal structures, however, they show differences regarding the kind of control relation. Functional control was attested in constructions where the main predicate is the auxiliary /kaan/, the causative verb /xalla/, phasal verbs, as well as non-inflecting modals. Anaphoric control was attested only with inflecting modals, with the modal /yi2dar/ ‘able’ showing a case of obligatory anaphoric control. This is, to my knowledge, the first study which attempts to develop a grammar for ECA using the XLE platform. It provides an insight over the issues correlated with developing this grammar, which could be a step towards including ECA into the ParGram project in order to develop broad coverage grammars for a bigger number of languages.

This study examines language style of Arabic newspapers particularly in the world affairs and sport sections, using the word frequency analysis. The study is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter mainly focuses on background and aims of the study, while review of previous studies is presented in the second chapter. Chapter Three discusses Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), the selected newspapers and the chosen sections. Chapter Four concerns on the methodology applied in the study. Analysis of the language style is presented in Chapter five and followed by findings which are discussed in Chapter Six. The final chapter provides summary, conclusion and suggestions for further research. The study employed a self-constructed method in corpus building. A total of 30 articles (world affairs and sports) from seven Arabic newspapers were collected from the official online websites mostly in November 2007. Five of the newspapers are published in Arab countries and one in both the United Kingdom and Australia. The Wordsmith version 5.0 was used in analyzing the corpus data. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were employed to analyse word frequency list in both categories, while the Likelihood ratio test was applied in the comparison analysis. Findings revealed that most high frequency words have close relationship to their respective categories especially in the use of nouns. Slight differences were identified in terms of word spelling, loan word, verb transitivity and phrase amongst the newspapers published in different countries s. It is also proven that there is a tendency in MSA to practice new features in news writing which is different from the well known Arabic grammar, i.e, verb and subject agreement in gender. Different newspapers have also demonstrated their own focus in news reporting, and sports section is found to use more specific words than world affairs section.

This thesis has two aims: developing resources for Arabic dialects and improving the speech recognition of Arabic dialects. Two important components are considered: Pronunciation Dictionary (PD) and Language Model (LM). Six parts are involved, which relate to building and evaluating dialects resources and improving the performance of systems for the speech recognition of dialects. Three resources are built and evaluated: one tool and two corpora. The methodology that was used for building the multi-dialect morphology analyser involves the proposal and evaluation of linguistic and statistic bases. We obtained an overall accuracy of 94%. The dialect text corpora have four sub-dialects, with more than 50 million tokens. The multi-dialect speech corpora have 32 speech hours, which were collected from 52 participants. The resultant speech corpora have more than 67,000 speech files. The main objective is improvement in the PDs and LMs of Arabic dialects. The use of incremental methodology made it possible to check orthography and phonology rules incrementally. We were able to distinguish the rules that positively affected the PDs. The Word Error Rate (WER) improved by an accuracy of 5.3% in MSA and 5% in Levantine. Three levels of morphemes were used to improve the LMs of dialects: stem, prefix+stem and stem+suffix. We checked the three forms using two different types of LMs. Eighteen experiments are carried out on MSA, Gulf dialect and Egyptian dialect, all of which yielded positive results, showing that WERs were reduced by 0.5% to 6.8%.

This thesis provides a thematic comparative review of some of the English translations of the Qur'an, including the works of Abdullah Yusuf Ali, Muhammad Asad, Taqiuddin Hilali and Muhsin Khan, and Zafarlshaq Ansari/Sayyid Mawdudi. In this study, a new and unique approach is used to review and compare these translations along with their commentaries. They are reviewed based on the following four Qur'anic themes: Injunctions, Stories, Parables, and Short Chapters. These are some of the key themes where the Qur'an translations, especially the ones with commentary, often differ from each other and can be assessed objectively. For each theme, three to four examples are taken as samples from the Qur'an, and they are studied from different points of view. For example, the translation of the verses with injunctions will be reviewed for their relative emphasis over the letter versus the spirit of the law, consideration of jurisprudence knowledge, overall objectives of Islamic law, issues of this age, and impact of the translator's environment. This approach is intended to identify further requirements for offering more accurate and more communicative translations of the Qur'an in the English language.