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Since gaining academic status in South African schools, the Arabic language has always been under the spotlight. In Gauteng schools, the focus of discussion is the validity of the Nāšiٓēn as a prescribed text book and the methodology best suited to achieve linguistic competence in the language. In order to teach the language, an accurate observation of the Arabic language by means of phonetics and psychology is a prerequisite, hence the practical study of language or the study of philology is scrutinized. In the literature study, the research discusses different interconnected themes i.e. how the brain acquires language; developments into teaching methods; it asks can language be learnt by imitating native speakers; are we born with the innate ability to learn a second language. A review of current methodology is undertaken. Suggestions are pragmatically motivated rather than being theoretically motivated. The eclectic approach is preferred with the intention of providing the most efficient access to Arabic forms and structures. The educational implications are discussed with a view to formulate language principles on which recommendations and suggestions can be formulated. / Religious Studies and Arabic / M.A. (Arabic)

This is a systematic study of tropes of the Holy Qur`an, divided into four chapters… The first chapter is entitled: “An historical review of rhetoric and stylistics” and it consists of two sections; the first section is entitled: “Western rhetoric and stylistics” where as the second section deals with “Arabic rhetoric and stylistics”. The second chapter is entitled: “Tropes and their components” and it consists of two sections; the first section is entitled: “the definition of tropes”. This section deals with the definition of “literal expressions” and “figurative expressions”, and the required condition for figurative expressions; that is the syntactical and semantic coherence and relationships. The second section is entitled: “Components of tropes” which deals with different components of tropes. The third chapter is entitled: “Linguistic tropes of the Holy Qur`an” and it consists of two sections; the first section is entitled: “The spread of linguistic tropes in the Holy Qur`an”. The second section is entitled: “Relationship of linguistic tropes in the Holy Qur`an”. This section quotes each and every relationship of linguistic tropes in the Holy Qur`an. The fourth chapter is entitled: “mental tropes in the Holy Qur`an”, and it consists of three sections; the first section is entitled: “Mental tropes in the Holy Qur`an, from part 1 to part 10”. The second section is entitled: “Mental tropes in the Holy Qur`an, from part 11 to part 20”, and the third section is entitled: “Mental tropes in the Holy Qur`an, from part 21 to part 30”. These sections quote verses of the Holy Qur`an which contain mental tropes. / Religious Studies and Arabic / Psychology

(in English): In this thesis several types of temporal verbal constructions in the Egyptian dialect of Arabic are to be discussed. The main focus was headed on the verbal forms connected with the most occuring auxiliary/temporal verbs kān and ba'a. An inextricable part of the thesis was a detailed insight in the theory of Arabic verbs, both in Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Dialect. Our aim was to find out the frequency of these verbal forms, comparing their appearance and their contextual embedding. For the purpose of the analysis an original corpus of texts in Egyptian dialect (more than 700 thousands words) was created. The sources of the corpus came almost exclusively from texts of Egyptian bloggers. Last but not least programm PERL served as the tool for our analysis - statistically and contextually allowing working out of all possible combinations of verbal forms in question.

Nesta dissertação tomamos por objeto de estudo a romanização, em português, de palavras árabes (e·g, termos, topônimos e antropônimos). Estudamos por que alguns nomes são grafados de maneiras diferentes em um ou outro jornal, por exemplo, analisamos esquemas existentes de romanização e propomos um sistema que seja não apenas conciso e regular, mas também abrangente e minucioso, podendo ser usado tanto por leigos quanto por acadêmicos. Os seis capítulos encontram-se divididos em duas partes. Na primeira parte, abordamos a relação entre transposição ortográfica (i·e, transcrição, transliteração romanização e latinização) e tradução; apresentamos a língua árabe e sua escrita; ressaltamos elementos pertinentes da ortografia do português brasileiro. Na segunda parte, cotejamos oito esquemas de romanização árabeportuguês, apontando suas (des)semelhanças; apresentamos nosso sistema de transposição ortográfica, em seus quatro módulos (leigo simplificado, leigo comum, acadêmico amplo e acadêmico estrito), incluindo exemplos de aplicação em nomes, expressões e um breve texto; concluímos antecipando os desdobramentos da proposta. / This master\'s thesis presents our research concerning the romanization of Arabic words (e·g, technical terms, toponyms and anthroponyms) into Portuguese. We have first studied why the way some nouns and proper names are written varies from source to source, then analysed some of the existing romanization schemes and, finally, proposed a system both concise and regular as well as comprehensive and detailed, one which is suitable for laymen and scholars alike. there are six chapters, distributed in two parts. In the first part, we see four orthographic transposition methods (transcription, transliteration, romanization and latinization) and how they relate to translation; the Arabic language and its writing script; and relevant aspects of the Brazilian Portuguese orthography. In the second part, we compare eight ArabicPortuguese romanization schemes, highlighting their (dis)similarities; introduce all four modules (laymans simplified, laymans common, scholars broad and scholars narrow) of our orthographic transposition system, including samples comprising names, expressions and a small text; and finish off with an assessment on how said proposal may unfold.

This thesis describes the research efforts on pivot-based statistical machine translation (SMT) for morphologically rich languages (MRL). We provide a framework to translate to and from morphologically rich languages especially in the context of having little or no parallel corpora between the source and the target languages. We basically address three main challenges. The first one is the sparsity of data as a result of morphological richness. The second one is maximizing the precision and recall of the pivoting process itself. And the last one is making use of any parallel data between the source and the target languages. To address the challenge of data sparsity, we explored a space of tokenization schemes and normalization options. We also examined a set of six detokenization techniques to evaluate detokenized and orthographically corrected (enriched) output. We provide a recipe of the best settings to translate to one of the most challenging languages, namely Arabic. Our best model improves the translation quality over the baseline by 1.3 BLEU points. We also investigated the idea of separation between translation and morphology generation. We compared three methods of modeling morphological features. Features can be modeled as part of the core translation. Alternatively these features can be generated using target monolingual context. Finally, the features can be predicted using both source and target information. In our experimental results, we outperform the vanilla factored translation model. In order to decide on which features to translate, generate or predict, a detailed error analysis should be provided on the system output. As a result, we present AMEANA, an open-source tool for error analysis of natural language processing tasks, targeting morphologically rich languages. The second challenge we are concerned with is the pivoting process itself. We discuss several techniques to improve the precision and recall of the pivot matching. One technique to improve the recall works on the level of the word alignment as an optimization process for pivoting driven by generating phrase pairs between source and target languages. Despite the fact that improving the recall of the pivot matching improves the overall translation quality, we also need to increase the precision of the pivot quality. To achieve this, we introduce quality constraints scores to determine the quality of the pivot phrase pairs between source and target languages. We show positive results for different language pairs which shows the consistency of our approaches. In one of our best models we reach an improvement of 1.2 BLEU points. The third challenge we are concerned with is how to make use of any parallel data between the source and the target languages. We build on the approach of improving the precision of the pivoting process and the methods of combination between the pivot system and the direct system built from the parallel data. In one of the approaches, we introduce morphology constraint scores which are added to the log linear space of features in order to determine the quality of the pivot phrase pairs. We compare two methods of generating the morphology constraints. One method is based on hand-crafted rules relying on our knowledge of the source and target languages; while in the other method, the morphology constraints are induced from available parallel data between the source and target languages which we also use to build a direct translation model. We then combine both the pivot and direct models to achieve better coverage and overall translation quality. Using induced morphology constraints outperformed the handcrafted rules and improved over our best model from all previous approaches by 0.6 BLEU points (7.2/6.7 BLEU points from the direct and pivot baselines respectively). Finally, we introduce applying smart techniques to combine pivot and direct models. We show that smart selective combination can lead to a large reduction of the pivot model without affecting the performance and in some cases improving it.

Este trabalho consiste na investigação da terminologia gramatical árabe, visando à padronização em língua portuguesa. Tendo em vista a grande quantidade dos fenômenos linguísticos, a análise restringiu-se às denominações da classe verbal. Dez termos principais e dezesseis termos secundários foram investigados em três corpora constituídos de gramáticas árabe-árabes; gramáticas árabes elaboradas por arabistas e de obras de referência cujo tema é a terminologia gramatical árabe. O objetivo principal desta pesquisa é propor uma padronização em português da terminologia morfossintática do verbo árabe que seja aparente aos leitores especializados brasileiros, a priori, e aos pesquisadores lusófonos cujo objeto de estudo seja a língua árabe. Elabora-se ainda um glossário terminológico Árabe-Português/ Português-Árabe. / This work consists of an investigation of Arabic grammatical terminology, aiming at the standardization in Portuguese language. In view of the great amount of linguistic phenomena, the analysis was restricted to the verbal class names. Ten principal terms and sixteen secondary terms were investigated in three corpora constituted by Arabic-Arabic Grammars; Arabic Grammar elaborated by Arabists and other reference works on Arabic Grammatical Terms. The main aim of this search is to suggest standardization in Portuguese of the morphosynthatic terminology of the Arabic verb which can be understandable to Brazilian skilled readers, at first, to Lusophone searchers whose study objective is Arabic language. It is elaborated a Terminological Glossary Arabic-Portuguese/ Portuguese-Arabic.

Este trabalho consiste na investigação da terminologia gramatical árabe, visando à padronização em língua portuguesa. Tendo em vista a grande quantidade dos fenômenos linguísticos, a análise restringiu-se às denominações da classe verbal. Dez termos principais e dezesseis termos secundários foram investigados em três corpora constituídos de gramáticas árabe-árabes; gramáticas árabes elaboradas por arabistas e de obras de referência cujo tema é a terminologia gramatical árabe. O objetivo principal desta pesquisa é propor uma padronização em português da terminologia morfossintática do verbo árabe que seja aparente aos leitores especializados brasileiros, a priori, e aos pesquisadores lusófonos cujo objeto de estudo seja a língua árabe. Elabora-se ainda um glossário terminológico Árabe-Português/ Português-Árabe. / This work consists of an investigation of Arabic grammatical terminology, aiming at the standardization in Portuguese language. In view of the great amount of linguistic phenomena, the analysis was restricted to the verbal class names. Ten principal terms and sixteen secondary terms were investigated in three corpora constituted by Arabic-Arabic Grammars; Arabic Grammar elaborated by Arabists and other reference works on Arabic Grammatical Terms. The main aim of this search is to suggest standardization in Portuguese of the morphosynthatic terminology of the Arabic verb which can be understandable to Brazilian skilled readers, at first, to Lusophone searchers whose study objective is Arabic language. It is elaborated a Terminological Glossary Arabic-Portuguese/ Portuguese-Arabic.

This study concerns itself with a linguistic contrastive analysis of one particular characteristic of grammar and vocabulary in both English and Arabic languages. That is, combinations of proper verbs with adverbial and/or prepositional particle(s), which are commonly known as: phrasal verbs. In addition, the thesis attempts to approve the fact that there are fundamental similarities and dissimilarities between English and Arabic phrasal verbs. Such similarities and dissimilarities are investigated at length through a theoretical comparison of these combinations in both languages. The main hypothesis of the study is that there are wide ranges of difficulties posed to Arabic professional translators and Arabic translation students when translating idiomatic English phrasal verbs into Arabic. Exploring such difficulties is the principle aim of the study. The other aim is to propose a number of recommendations for professional translators, lexicographers and pedagogues. Such recommendations are based on a range of findings arrived at from the empirical research carried out in the study. A linguistic contrastive analysis model for the analysis and translation of idiomatic English phrasal verbs into Arabic is devised in order to establish a yardstick by which the translation quality of such idiomatic expressions can be analysed, compared, evaluated and assessed. Translation tests are conducted to identify types of errors and translational pitfalls made by Arabic professional translators and Arabic translation students when handling the most problematic and challenging idiomatic English phrasal verbs. The results revealed that there are in fact lots of difficulties encountered by Arabic professional translators and Arabic translation students when dealing with the phenomenon of idiomatic English phrasal verbs. The most important aspect of such difficulties is the failure to achieve functional-pragmatic equivalents of such verbs. Overtly erroneous errors such as: literal translation, mistranslating, reducing idioms to sense and breaching of the Arabic language system, along with covertly erroneous errors, such as wrong Arabic collocation, shift of register, incorrect delivery of speech acts, usage of paraphrasing and usage of Arabic colloquial and regional dialects, were the major reasons behind the failure of delivering the appropriate functional pragmatic equivalents of the idiomatic English phrasal verbs listed in the translation tests.ABSTRACT / (PhD)

The phenomenon of word-final imaala, or taa-marbuuTa raising, in the Levantine dialects of Arabic was well documented about 50 years ago by renowned Arabists who described the phenomenon as a purely phonological one. Today, after some major historical and sociological changes have taken place in Arab societies, this feature deserves to be revisited since this might shed some light on the processes of language change in those societies. The scope of this paper is to look into the issue of word-final imaala in contemporary Levantine Arabic (specifically after raa) through a wide lens, and to establish 1) whether there are patterns governing the production of taa marbuuTa after raa, and 2) whether the existing phonological rules account for all instances of word-final imaala as they appear in the speech of Levantine speakers nowadays. In order to do that, instances of all word tokens ending in -ra were extracted from 252 phone conversations recorded in 2004 and found in the LDC Levantine database. Those tokens were analyzed and the word-forms they represent were divided based on whether they exhibit any instances on word-final imaala. It soon became clear that the existing sound rules cannot account for all current instances of taa-marbouTa raising. Two main factors were identified as having a possible effect on the production of taa marbuuTa after raa: word frequency and phonological word classes. Because of a lack of speaker-related information in the database coupled with some imaala-related discrepancies found in the transcriptions of the conversations, it was impossible to determine the exact social meaning(s) of word-final imaala in Levantine communities. However, this study shows that enough changes have taken place since the 1960’s in terms of taa-marbuuTa raising, to consider it a case of language change in progress. This study also establishes some hypotheses which can be used as the base for a future sociolinguistic study whose scope will be to assign social meaning to word-final imaala in Levantine dialects. / text