Thesis (Ph.D.)--Georgetown University, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral)--Jāmiʻat al-Qiddīs Yūsuf, Beirut, 1991. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 599-611).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1983. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 285-302).

This thesis explores the phenomenon of variable use of case marking in spoken formal Arabic in search of extra-syntactic meanings. The thesis rejects the views that case marking is constrained primarily by speakers' ability in Standard Arabic, or that case marking is implicated solely in code-switching. Instead, the study takes a holistic approaches and attempts to determine whether the use and non-use of case marking operates as a meaningful linguistic system. This thesis consists of two chapters: in the first, a subset of the data is analyzed quantitatively, while the second treats the data qualitatively. The data for the study was taken from publicly broadcast Arabic language television programs. The primary finding is that the choice between use and non-use of case marking operates as a linguistic system, and that case marking is used primarily to mark highly salient nouns in the discourse. This thesis also finds that this system extends to pragmatics, including register variation and maintainance, as well as politeness strategies. Finally, the study discusses the role that case marking plays in the construction of a speaker's linguistic style. These findings support the theory that syntactically optional elements of speech are often conditioned and meaningful beyond the level of syntax. / text

This thesis is an investigation into the aesthetic and political functions of “rumor” in modern Egypt. While previous studies have emphasized the formal or structural features of the genre, I seek to analyze the discursive, political and technological contexts that contribute to its persistence as such a powerful and ambivalent way of imagining speech. The scope of my analysis is a collection of texts culled from the tradition of Arabic letters in Egypt, beginning with early works of historiography (16th century), and into the political journals, newspapers, and novels of the 20th century, as well as the blogs, search engines and internet forums of the 21st century. I argue that specific discourses and imaginings of the rumor – contingent and mutable – emerged as an inseparable feature of the elite author’s textual encounter with the masses. Anxieties over the agency of various mass subjects – the urban crowd, the citizenry, and others – have contributed to the ways in which different writers reify speech. The final chapters of my thesis turn to focus on rumors about the death of President Husni Mubarak, in order to analyze the role the genre plays in contests over national political authority. Here, the rumor is an index of fears, passions, fantasies and other narratives that the writers both draw on and contribute to. Foregrounding these associations becomes a powerful aesthetic and affective process that allows actors to "fix" - solidify and treat - the agency and subjectivity of others. / text

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.

This is the study of a previously neglected genre in pre-modern Arabic literature: the (poetic) epigram anthology. The epigram anthology was pioneered by a handful of poets in 14th-century Syria, but the genre was soon taken up by anthologists across the pre-modern Middle East and soon became one of the most popular types of Arabic poetry up until the modern period. This study is divided into two parts. Part One deals with critical issues in literary history and comparative literature, while Part Two is made up of three encapsulated studies on specific aspects of the social and literary (structural and textual) composition of the texts. In Part One, the epistemological background of the terms epigram and anthology is surveyed and their suitability for application to pre-modern Arabic literature is evaluated. Part One also includes a comprehensive history of the maqāṭīʿ (sing. maqṭūʿ, also maqṭūʿah) genre in Arabic as well as a detailed explication of this style of poetry, its anthological context, its generic status in the Arabic literary tradition, and its relation to the wider world-literary category of epigram. The three chapters of Part Two are devoted to the social network of anthologists and poets, the structure and composition of the anthologies themselves, and the way in which anthologists used a technique, which is called ‘variation’ in this study, to link the cited poetic material into an organic whole respectively. NB: This is a literary-historical study informed by the discipline of comparative literature; it is not primarily a philolological, biographical, or codicological investigation. The literary material presented here is what has been deemed most relevant for the purposes of the larger generic discussion at the centre of this literary-historical study. An annotated bibliography of unpublished sources is provided in an appendix in order to help the reader navigate the tricky present status of many Mamluk and Ottoman era sources.

The field of Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL) has seen in recent decades a growing interest in portraying and teaching one of the most salient and intrinsic features of Arabic: language variation. This thesis takes a position in contrast to approaches that portray the two varieties as being distinct and well-defined dichotomic units, in favour of an approach that interprets them as two heterogeneous language varieties within one singular linguistic system. The two language varieties are embodied by Standard and Colloquial Arabic and it is argued here for the teaching of both varieties to students of Arabic as a foreign language. In this light, this thesis sets out to investigate the development of two language skills, vocabulary knowledge and language awareness, in a diglossic learning environment. Moreover, it explores the attitudes and perceptions of the students towards Arabic variation. Two experimental methods based on focus-on-form instruction are used in this research to teach Colloquial Arabic to students of Arabic as a foreign language at higher-education level, and the empirical research is conducted within a semi-embedded research design in which qualitative and quantitative data are collected. Students from three universities participate in this research: the Universities of Exeter, Genoa and Milan. This allows for the comparison of results from students of different mother tongues. The main research question that this thesis sets out to answer is: does focus-on-form instruction lead to vocabulary development in two diglossic varieties, namely Standard and Colloquial Arabic, more effectively when it focuses on the two varieties separately or when it links their forms? Two sub-questions investigate which of the two methods of focus-on-form instruction lead more efficiently to the development of language awareness, and the impact they have on students’ attitudes towards Arabic variation. The last sub-question asks to what extent the development of the diglossic language skills and attitudes is a consequence of the method of instruction received. The results of this study suggest that the answer lies in focusing predominantly on one variety at a time with additional consolidation exercises that compare the forms of the two varieties. The main contributions of this thesis are both theoretical, to the literature of TAFL, and empirical, regarding the development of the language skills and attitudes measured.

This thesis comprises a comparative typological study of Egyptian Judaeo-Arabic folk tales' and letters' grammatical features from the Ottoman period, with the aim of establishing the degree to which variation exists between two genres of written Judaeo-Arabic, and how it manifests itself. Within Judaeo-Arabic textual studies, the dominant trend is to examine a single genre of this written form of Arabic from one or more chronological period in isolation. As such, we know much about the linguistic features of business letters (Khan 1992, 2006, 2013; Wagner 2010, 2014), Biblical translations (Hary 1992, 2009) and folk tales (Palva 2007-2008; Hasson-Kenat 2016; Ørum 2017). Yet, our understanding of the extent and nature of linguistic variation between genres of written Judaeo-Arabic is somewhat limited. This research project addresses this disciplinary desideratum, working predominantly with previously unedited and untranslated manuscripts and adopting an inter-genre and diachronic comparative approach, throughout. The scope of this thesis is limited to two genres of written Judaeo-Arabic, focsuing on a small number of corpora (which each contain three to five manuscripts) from the fifteenth-nineteenth centuries. The thesis is divided into two main sections. The first of these examines the orthographical and (limited) phonological data available in these corpora. Among the more notable contributions in this section are: (i) a (re)-examination of the diacritical dot, both in relation to the much discussed Arabic letter ğīm, and other graphemes, which have been all but neglected in existing scholarship; (ii) an exploration of the potential motivations behind the separation of the definite article, a key feature of late written Judaeo-Arabic; and (iii) an investigation into the plene spelling of short vowels and the information contained therein. The second section is devoted to a detailed study of diachronic developments and inter-genre variaton in subordination, divided into three sub-sections. In the first of these sub-sections, I focus on syndetic and asyndetic forms of complementation, complement types, the modalities of complementtaking predicates, and complementisers. The second sub-section builds on previous studies of relative clauses in written Judaeo-Arabic (cf. e.g., Wagner 2010). The final sub-section centres on analysis of adverbial subordination and adverbial clause markers. The results of these explorations demonstrate that with regard to written Judaeo-Arabic, we may speak of consistent differences in styles unique to each genre. I conclude by expressing the intention of expanding this research to include an intergenre, diachronic study of written Judeao-Arabic morphological features, at a future date.