When women are lured away from home, they become vulnerable and cannot survive the violence inflicted upon them by their ‘lovers.’ This thesis explores the ties between two distinct cultural regions, Arabic and Appalachian, to examine the violence against women and what allows these women to escape such situations by using Hanan al-Shaykh’s One Thousand and One Nights: A Retelling and three traditional Appalachian murdered girl ballads. Many of the women in these stories die at the hands of their ‘lovers,’ regardless of their culture of origin. Once removed from their fellow women, they lack a support system that would allow them the strength to survive. While most of the women in these tales die at the hands of their ‘lovers,’ Shahrazad of One Thousand and One Nights: A Retelling survives because she is able to take back some control of the situation by telling her own story, instead of allowing it to be told for her. She survives the bleak situation she has been put in through the support of her sister, who makes it possible for Shahrazad to continue telling her stories. The support Shahrazad receives from her sister allows her to not only save herself, but also to save the lives of other women. This thesis concludes that it is this “sister” support that enables women to survive the violence consistently thrown at them and allows them to take back control of their own narratives.

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<p>This dissertation sheds light on the semantic domain of causation in Arabic. The aim is to examine two Arabic causative verb forms, Form I and Form II, and their associations with (in)directness of causation. The central working hypothesis throughout this work is the verb-semantics hypothesis by Shibatani and Pardeshi (2002), which posits that autonomy of the causee, degree of directed causation, requirement for an external causer, and merger of two subevents into one conceptual event are factors that predict the morpho-syntactic complexity of a causative construction. Following the lead of Ambridge et al. (2020) on their operationalization of the verb-semantics hypothesis by Shibatani and Pardeshi (2002), two experiments were conducted. In both experiments, 60 animations for 60 verbs were used to depict various causative scenarios. The first experiment explored how Arabic speakers mentally perceived 60 events that depicted various degrees of causativity. This was achieved through collecting ratings from 20 Arabic speakers on four semantic variables: autonomy of the causee, degree of directed causation, degree of event-merge, and the requirement for an external causer. The second experiment obtained judgments of the relative acceptability of the less- and more-transparent causative forms of the same 60 verbs from 24 native-speaking Arabic adults. </p> <p>Three analyses were conducted on the results to better understand how causatives manifest in language use cross-linguistically, with a dedicated focus on the Arabic language.The first analysis addressed whether the four semantic variables of the verb-semantics hypothesis of Shibatani and Pardeshi (2002) account for the restrictions on the use of Arabic verb Form I and Form II. It was found that the variables autonomy of the causee, degree of directed causation, and the requirement for an external causer each showed strong positive correlations with Form I. The variable degree of event-merge showed a weak positive correlation with Form I. No correlations were noticed between any of the four variables and Form II. The second analysis addressed whether Arabic speakers perceive events in a similar way to speakers of other languages. Because this study followed the methodology Ambridge et al. (2020) used to examine causatives in English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and Kʼicheʼs, the results could be directly compared. It was discovered that yes, Arabic speakers conceptualize the events tested similarly to speakers of the five other comparison languages. Twenty-three verbs (>38.3%) were rated the same by all speakers (120 speakers, 20 from each language) on all four semantic variables. From the remaining thirty-seven verbs, twenty-three verbs received the same ratings in three of the semantic variables, but not in event-merge. The remaining fourteen verbs were associated with numerous disagreements among the participants. The third and final analysis addressed the claim that all human languages use morphosyntax to mark the difference between direct versus indirect causative events by testing whether this holds true for Arabic. Across-linguistic computational model developed by Aryawibawa et al. (2021) was used to answer this question on the reasoning that if the principle is truly cross-linguistic, then the universal model should be able to utilize speaker semantic judgements to make accurate predictions about the grammatical acceptability of the different morphosyntactic forms. The model accurately predicted Arabic speaker judgments by a moderate correlation of 0.05, suggesting that Arabic conceptualizes directness of causation in a similar way to other languages, which supports the view that the underlying semantic distinction of more versus less direct causation maps onto and manifests as a morphosyntactic distinction. </p>

The importance of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Systems, whose job is to generate text from audio, is increasing as the number of applications of these systems is rapidly going up. However, when it comes to training ASR systems, the process is difficult and rather tedious, and that could be attributed to the lack of training data. ASRs require huge amounts of annotated training data containing the audio files and the corresponding accurately written transcript files. This annotated (labeled) training data is very difficult to find for most of the languages, it usually requires people to perform the annotation manually which, apart from the monetary price it costs, is error-prone. A supervised training task is impractical for this scenario.  The Arabic language is one of the languages that do not have an abundance of labeled data, which makes its ASR system's accuracy very low compared to other resource-rich languages such as English, French, or Spanish. In this research, we take advantage of unlabeled voice data by learning general data representations from unlabeled training data (only audio files) in a self-supervised task or pre-training phase. This phase is done by using wav2vec 2.0 framework which masks out input in the latent space and solves a contrastive task. The model is then fine-tuned on a few amounts of labeled data. We also exploit models that have been pre-trained on different languages, by using wav2vec 2.0, for the purpose of fine-tuning them on Arabic language by using annotated Arabic data.   We show that using wav2vec 2.0 framework for pre-training on Arabic is considerably time and resource-consuming. It took the model 21.5 days (about 3 weeks) to complete 662 epochs and get a validation accuracy of 58%.  Arabic is a right-to-left (rtl) language with many diacritics that indicate how letters should be pronounced, these two features make it difficult for Arabic to fit into these models, as it requires heavy pre-processing for the transcript files. We demonstrate that we can fine-tune a cross-lingual model, that is trained on raw waveforms of speech in multiple languages, on Arabic data and get a low word error rate 36.53%. We also prove that by fine-tuning the model parameters we can increase the accuracy, thus, decrease the word error rate from 54.00% to 36.69%.

This book has emerged from courses the author has taught at the Université de Provence for many years. It is intended to be a “systematic introduction to the syntax of classical Arabic”1 (p.5) for students on a Master’s degree level. Many of the topics presented here have been discussed in detail by the author in previous articles. A book on the verbal system of classical Arabic, which also came about from his teaching activity, appeared in the same textbook series, “Collection manuels”, in 2003.2 The matter is arranged according to the following categories: simple phrases (p. 13–124), complex phrases (p. 125–198), sentence complexes (p. 199–298).3 Each part consists of numerous sub-chapters, which are well organized and illustrated with a large number of examples.

This study comprises an introduction and six chapters. The introduction presents a chronological synopsis of the development of Arabic language teaching up to now. Chapter One presents a broad framework for this study as well as the problem and associated questions whose resolution is being sought, namely treating shortcomings relating to the teaching of Arabic to non-Arabic speakers as regards reading. Chapter Two is a survey of the theoretical study that classifies the most psychological, pedagogic, cultural, linguistic and reading competence principles needing compliance in the compilation and simplification of texts. Chapter Three comprises texts that have been simplified by this researcher. Chapter Four analyses and appraises simplified texts by providing mechanisms used for that purpose. Chapter Five comprises a model lesson, based on the principles outlined above. Chapter Six reviews the most important findings in terms of the ideal time needed for realising the hypothesis of the research and provides other proposals and concluding comments. / Religious Studies and Arabic / M.A. (Arabic)

In the Arabic language a “word/particle” is divided into three classes: noun verb and particle. After research of relevant literature it became evident to this researcher that the bulk of research related to signifying particles has stressed their complementary relation to nouns and verbs which has created shortcomings in these studies. The most noteworthy of them has been to restrict a study of particles either to their linguistic or grammatical functions or to confine this endeavor to some particles only. This study aims to study all particles as independent components of Arabic signifiers. In the first section , the researcher reviews relevant grammatical terminologies relating to and associated with the particles such as: speech ,word , noun, verb…etc, and outlines both instances of similarities and differences found among them. He then elucidates the three categories of word particles by referring to the peculiarities of each of them. The remaining chapters are devoted to presenting the linguistic definitions of each word particle , beginning with single phoneme particles and systematically progressing to higher ones. Essentially all word particles fulfill linguistic functions before they may fulfill any syntactic or other functions. After reviewing their linguistic functions, the researcher queries , or proposes the possibility of using linguistic terminology for them instead of using syntactical or grammatical terminology because the former embraces all word particles whereas the latter is restricted to just some of them. In the final section, he focuses on the syntactical functions of the semantic particles, and their influence grammatically , wehter it is permanent or occasional influence. He also explains word particles associated with whether nouns or verbs , or with both of them. / الكلمة في اللغة العربية تنقسم الى ثلاثة أقسام :اسم وفعل وحرف، ولقد تبين للباحث بعد مراجعته للأدبيات أن معظم الدراسات التى تناولت حروف المعاني تناولتها من منظور انها مكملة للقسمين الآخرين، هذه النظرية أدّت إلى قصور في الدراسة، وقد تجلى اهم أوجه هذا القصور أولا في التركيز على جانب واحد من جوانب دراسة الحروف، اعني الجانب اللغوي او الوظيفة النحوية، او الإقتصار على بعض الحروف دون سائرها. هذا البحث يعتبر محاولة لدراسة جميع الحروف كقسم مستقل من أقسام الكلمة العربية، يبتدأ الباحث فيه - في الفصل الأول - باستعراض المصطلحات النحوية المحيطة والمرتبطة بالحروف من قبيل : الكلام والكلمة واللفظ والقول ...الخ مبيناً كيفة تداخل وترابط تلك المصطلحات وأوجه إختلافها، ثم أقسام الكلام الثلاثة مع الإشارة إلى مميزات كل قسمٍ وخصائصه ، وتتناول بقية الفصول المعاني اللغوية للحروف- إبتداء بالحروف الأحادية ثم الثنائية والثلاثية والرباعية و الخماسية - لأنّ الأصل في كل الكلمات أن تؤدّي وظائف لغوية محدّدة قبل أن يكون لها دورٌ نحويٌ او لايكون، ويتساءل الباحث او يقترح – بعد استعراض المعاني الللغوية للحروف – امكانية استخدام التسميات اللغوية للحروف بدلاً من التسمية النحوية، لأنّ الأولى تشمل كلّ الحروف ، بينما تقتصر الثانية على قسمٍ من الحروف . ثمّ يتدرج إلى الفصل الأخير المخصص للعمل النحوي للحروف ، مستعرضاً أوجه عملها – سواء كانت دائمة العمل أو عاملة أحياناً ومهملة في بعض الأحوال- ومبيناً ما يختص منها بالعمل بالاسم او بالفعل وما يشترك في الدخول عليهما. / Linguistics

As more second-language acquisition research is published about the optimal age to begin foreign language instruction, and the best methods for teaching foreign languages, many colleges and universities are seeking to create intensive immersion programs which would prepare prospective students for the rigors of their language programs and serve as a productive language-learning environment. One such program, the Middlebury-Monterey Language Academy, is based on the highly successful summer language schools model. This research isolates the components which would help create successful, intensive Arabic immersion programs. Specifically, this thesis asks: How can an institution create a successful Arabic immersion learning environment for high school students? To answer this question, this thesis reviews current literature in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), includes personal observations about the program and analyzes responses to surveys administered to two groups of stakeholders, namely students, and teachers/resident assistants. After the descriptive section, the thesis proposes a curricular framework which encompasses the main components of the curriculum (including goals, teacher and learner training, instructional materials, and native versus target language use). This framework is presented as a model to help teachers and other administrators as they try to set up new Arabic programs for high school students. / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1979. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 419-426).

This study comprises an introduction and six chapters. The introduction presents a chronological synopsis of the development of Arabic language teaching up to now. Chapter One presents a broad framework for this study as well as the problem and associated questions whose resolution is being sought, namely treating shortcomings relating to the teaching of Arabic to non-Arabic speakers as regards reading. Chapter Two is a survey of the theoretical study that classifies the most psychological, pedagogic, cultural, linguistic and reading competence principles needing compliance in the compilation and simplification of texts. Chapter Three comprises texts that have been simplified by this researcher. Chapter Four analyses and appraises simplified texts by providing mechanisms used for that purpose. Chapter Five comprises a model lesson, based on the principles outlined above. Chapter Six reviews the most important findings in terms of the ideal time needed for realising the hypothesis of the research and provides other proposals and concluding comments. / Religious Studies and Arabic / M.A. (Arabic)