Zugl.: Berlin, Freie Univ., Diss., 2006

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The overall purpose of this study is to correlate features of compliments and compliment responses in Jordanian Arabic with social variables including gender, age, and traditionalism. This research project sets out to investigate the following questions:1. Do men and women give and respond to compliments differently? If so, how?2. Do people of different age groups give and respond to compliments differently? Ifso, how?3. Do traditional and non-traditional people give and respond to compliments differently? If so, how?Naturally occurring examples of compliments/ compliment responses were gathered by 10 fieldworkers in the research site of Irbid, Jordan. The dependent variables that were investigated include the topics, syntactic patterns, positive semantic carriers, the format of compliments, and the types of compliment responses.The results indicate that although the complimenting behavior of Jordanian people is similar in some ways, the social variables do correlate with some systematic differences. Specifically, people who share the same gender, age, or level of traditionalism compliment each other more frequently than persons who differ in any of these categories. Moreover, females and young people primarily use the following complimenting categories: compliments on appearance, explicit compliments, exclamatory syntactic patterns, and compliment plus explanation. Women and men differ in using compliment responses in that the women prefer questions and accounts compared to the men who employ more blessings and disagreements. Explanations forthese variations are discussed, based on the functions of compliments and the nature of the Jordanian culture.This research contributes to socio-pragmatics by analyzing variation in the use of complimenting in a relatively homogenous speech community. It tackles some culture-specific features of politeness and indirectness that are crucial to any politeness theory. The research also serves pedagogical purposes in that the application of its results in the classroom will help to reduce the communication breakdowns often experienced by L2 learners. With respect to methodology, the study provides adequate data to further test the validity of natural data collection in the investigation of speech acts. / Department of English

This dissertation studies the prosodic structure of the variety of Jordanian Arabic that is spoken in the rural areas of the Governorate of Irbid (IA) by investigating the role of syntactic structure in the formation of prosodic domains. It empirically explores the word-level, phrase-level and clause-level prosody of IA and attempts to account for these empirical results in a framework based on the standard syntactic-prosodic interface principles developed in Match Theory (Selkirk 2011) and formulated as OT constraints (Prince & Smolensky 1993). The basic hypotheses in this dissertation are that the prosodic word (ω), phonological phrase (Φ) and intonational phrase (ι) are present in IA, and that they are anchored in syntactic constituents. Relying on hypotheses derived from the MATCH constraints (Selkirk 2011) that ensure the syntactic-prosodic correspondence, ω, Φ and ι should respectively match the grammatical word, syntactic phrase and clause and should recursively match embedded syntactic constituents. A series of experiments was designed to test the hypotheses. Twenty native speakers (ten males and ten females) of Jordanian Arabic living in Irbid participated in the tasks. Each pair of participants performed several tasks in one session. Two game-based tasks were designed to explore intonational and temporal cues to Φ and ι boundaries and examine their relation to XPs and clauses, respectively. Two additional reading tasks were designed to determine the application domain of post-lexical segmental processes in IA (the coarticulation of pharyngealization and vowel hiatus resolution). The collected tokens were submitted to acoustic and statistical analyses. Based on the results of these experiments, the existence of the ω, Φ and ι is confirmed and our understanding of their segmental and suprasegmental cues is refined. ω’s match grammatical words and are the domain of stress, realization of the feminine -t suffix and coarticulation of pharyngealization. Φ`s match syntactic phrases and are cued suprasegmentally: their right boundaries are marked by low phrase accents (L-) and pre-boundary syllable lengthening. As for ι`s, they match clauses and are cued by additional final lengthening, boundary tones (H% or L%) and resistance to vowel reduction. There is also ample evidence that syntactic nesting motivates prosodic recursion. At the ω level, the primary/secondary status of genitive constructs of stress mirrors syntactic nesting. At the Φ level, recursion is evidenced by gradient pre-boundary syllable lengthening, which is greater at the right boundaries of higher prosodic subcategories that match larger syntactic domains. As for recursion at the ι level, it is not only cued by gradient pre-boundary syllable lengthening, but also by boundary tones: continuative H% are used at sentence-internal ι boundaries, but L% tones are cues to boundaries of larger ι’s. However, prosodic recursion is not unconstrained in IA: prosodic domains can only consist of two subcategories, i.e. a minimal and maximal layers. In this way, prosodic recursion is neither prohibited as proposed in the early version of Strict Layer Hypothesis (Nespor &Vogel 1986, Selkirk 1986), nor free to perfectly mirror syntactic nesting. As in most previous case studies, it is proposed that the one-to-one correspondence constraints of Match Theory (Selkirk 2011) account for the prosodic patterns in IA, but have to be complemented with language-specific markedness constraints on phonological weight, exhaustivity and recursion. It is also shown that these explanatory principles can, with minor reorganization, account for the prosodic patterns described in other Arabic dialects.

This study measured and analyzed job satisfaction among faculty members at Yarmouk University in relation to gender, marital status, age, annual salary, years of experience, academic rank, academic activity, faculty affiliation, country in which the last degree was received, tenure status, and nationality. The population consisted of 350 full-time faculty members. A total of 216 (61.7%) faculty members participated in this study. The data collecting instruments consisted of the faculty data sheet and the Job Descriptive Index. Frequencies, percentages, means, and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) were employed to analyze the data. The level of significance was set at 0.05. A Scheffe method of multiple comparison was used for follow-up investigation. Although the results of the study indicate that there were no significant differences in job satisfaction among faculty members with regard to gender, marital status, academic activity, and the country in which the faculty member received the last degree, significant differences were found with regard to age, annual salary, nationality, years of experience, rank, tenure status, and faculty affiliation.

The aim of this thesis is the characterization of a protein involved in apoptosis. Our group has identified an early step common to different forms of intrinsic apoptosis stimuli. This step requires de novo synthesis of a novel Cyclin, Cyclin O, that upon apoptosis induction in lymphoid cells forms active complexes, primarily with Cdk2. Cyclin O expression precedes glucocorticoid and gamma radiation-induced apoptosis in vivo in mouse thymus and its overexpression induces apoptosis in cultured cells. Knocking down the endogenous expression of Cyclin O by shRNA leads to the inhibition of glucocorticoid and DNA damage-induced apoptosis while leaving CD95 death receptor mediated apoptosis intact. This data demonstrates that apoptosis induction in lymphoid cells is one of the physiological roles of Cyclin O and it does not act by perturbing a normal cellular process such as the cell cycle. In addition we have identified c-Myb a substrate of Cdk2-Cyclin O complexes and we show that c-Myb is downregulated during apoptosis of lymphoid cells. / L'objectiu d'aquesta tesi és la caracterització d'una proteïna involucrada en l'apoptosi. El nostre grup ha identificat un pas primerenc comú en diversos estímuls apoptòtics de la ruta intrínseca. Aquest pas requereix la síntesi de novo d'una nova Ciclina, Ciclina O, que quan s'indueix apoptosi en cèl·lules limfoides forma complexes actius majoritàriament amb Cdk2. L'expressió de la Ciclina O és prèvia a l'apoptosi induïda per glucocorticoids i radiació gamma i la seva sobreexpressió indueix apoptosi en cultius cel·lulars. La baixada dels nivells d'expressió de la Ciclina O endògena amb shRNA provoca una inhibició de l'apoptosi induïda per glucocorticoids o agents que danyen el DNA, mentre que l'apoptosi mediada pel receptor CD95 es manté intacta. Aquests resultats demostren que la inducció d'apoptosi en cèl·lules limfoides és una de les funcions fisiològiques de la Ciclina O i que no es deu a una pertorbació de processos cel·lulars normals com ara el cicle cel·lular. A més a més, hem identificat c-Myb com a substrat dels complexes Cdk2-Ciclina O i demostrem que els nivells de c-Myb baixen durant l'apoptosis de cèl·lules limfoides.