This study investigates the acquisition of a most intriguing system of nominal plurality in Arabic, the Broken Plural (BP), in the speech of bilingual Iraqi-English children. BP is an irregular plural form, there is no fixed suffix to be added and it is derived by altering the consonant and vowel patterns inside the singular noun/adjective. Monolinguals acquire it from their environment; they learn it spontaneously as they grow up and expand their vocabulary. The study includes 11 bilingual children living in the UK and ‘control groups’: 9 female adults living in the UK, 11 monolingual female adults and 17 monolingual children living in Baghdad. Data collection combined quantitative and qualitative techniques. The research as a whole addresses the issues of how reduced Iraqi Arabic input can affect the formation of BP, the range of strategies that the bilingual children use to recoup their lack of knowledge and the correlation between these strategies and social factors, viz. parents’ level of education and proficiency in English, language use at home (input), and attitudes. The data (BP) were analysed into correct and incorrect responses based on monolingual female adults performance. The incorrect responses (repair strategies) were classified into various categories including: overgeneralisation (used more frequently by bilinguals as a default form but was least favoured by the monolingual children); and the employment of ‘rudimentary semantic strategies’ rather than morphological markers e.g. repetition/singular, new words, random patterns. The findings show that the formation of BP is present in bilingual children –to a different digree- but its formation underwent a crucial reanalysis. There is a strong correlation between the social factors and the repair strategies. Bilingual children’s attitudes towards English positively correlate with their low proficiency in Iraqi Arabic (IA); parents’ attitudes towards IA, religion and identity as core values; and parents’ command of English were also found to play a crucial role in nurturing or impairing the use of IA, which in turn affects acquisition of BP.

This thesis attempts to study the celebrated literaryhistorical and critical work, al-TIhakhira of Ibn Bassam, from a number of aspects that have until now received either inadeQuate attention or no attention at all. It is divided into two parts, the first of which is concerned principally with the author and his work in their historical and critical context. There are six main sections in this part: The cultural background of the fourth and fifth centuries; Ibn Bassam's life; Ibn Bassam's education and literary career; The background to al-TIhakhira; Ibn Bassam's regional system and some of his critical attitudes; Ibn Bassam's literary criticism. The second part consists of an attempt to analyse, in different ways, a number of sample passages of Ibn Bassam's writing, in order to examine the techniQues underlying his artistic composition. It is not claimed that the means by which his effects were obtained were necessarily selfconscious; it seems, however, worthwhile to investigate any characteristics that can be identified and analysed, if we are to be able fully to evaluate and appreciate the literary Qualities of the best Arabic prose-writing. This part concludes with a summary of the characteristics of Ibn Bass~'s style that emerge from the detailed analyses. Finally, the names of all the liteOrary figures dealt with in al-Dhakhira are listed in an appendix.

The name Mukhadrimin/Mukhadramin is given to those Arabic poets who were born before Islam but continued to live and compose during the Islamic period. A portion of the surviving poetry of these poets - specifically, the longer and most complete poems that are believed to have been composed after the advent of Islam by the most important of the poets generally designated by this name - has been taken as the basis for a~ attempt to compile a stylistic concordance. This particular body of work is of a convenient size for such an attempt, and it has the added advantage that the impact of Islam might be expected to have affected it in certain common respects that would distinguish it from pre-Islamic poetry. The "Index of descriptive words and phrases", which forms the principal part of·this thesis, lists the words and phrases used to refer to, and to describe, both directly and metaphorically, the persons, objects, and other phenomena that most commonly appear in what may be termed the more "conventional" sections of these compositions, that is to say, the very large proportion of lines in which the poets, like all early Arabic poets, compose variations on certain conventional themes. The ultimate object must be, of course, to make such a concordance, and indeed other kinds of concordances, for the whole of early Arabic poetry. It will then be possible to say to what extent different periods can be distinguished from one another. The "Index" compiled here represents an experiment carried out on a limited, and to some extent legitimately separable, portion of an enormous corpus. It is to hoped that the process will prove useful for wider application. Texts of the poems are provided for reference; many of them have been translated into English in the form in which they appear in Ibn Hisham by A. Guilla~ but since the nlwans of the individual poets - where these exist - often present fuller, and variant, versions, and since it is sometimes possible to produce a closer rendering than that of Guillaume new translations are also offered here. Basic annotations and short biographies of the poets are appended.

Early Arab writers have little to say about Ibn al-Rùm and his poetry. His life and his poetry are, indeed, different from early Arabic poets and poetry in general. Those who have written on Ibn al-Rùm have covered neither the whole of his life nor the whole of his works. There are, consequently, in my opinion, many aspects of his life and poetry which need to be studied. I have approached Ibn al-Rùm's life through his poetry and have used this as my primary source, attempting to see the relevance of his poetry to his life and hopefully, the relevance of his life to his poetry. I have not devoted a separate chapter to the period during which Ibn al-Rùm lived and wrote; I have attempted to study this period through Ibn al-Rùm's poetry and life. This thesis consists of an Abstract, a short introductory notice, three chapters and a brief summation. My main concern has been to translate the poetry into English and to assist it to speak in its own voice, adding notes and comments only when strictly necessary. In the first chapter (one) Ibn al-Rùm's ancestry, education and emotionally fraught life are studied, as well as his relationship with Caliphs and princes, his intellectual and physical malaise, his effeminacy and the milieu in which he lived. In chapter two; I study Istiqsa' before Ibn al-Rùm and his poetry Tashkis, his quotations from al-Qur'an and from the Jahli and 'Abbasid poetry. His relationship with the other poets of his period and the role played by the realm of the senses in his Dwan. Chapter three is a study of the genres: panegyrics, lampoons, elegies and love poetry. The work ends with a short summary of the principal findings of this study of Ibn al-Rùm through his poetry.

In the contemporary globalized world, translation plays a key role in sharing news across the globe, in particular in the age of multimedia, where meaning is transferred through various modes and genres. This study focuses on two Arab Spring speeches of Mummar Algaddafi’s and Hosni Mubarak’s and their translations in different media. The thesis initially conducts a comparative study of the source texts (STs), including a textual/contextual analysis drawing on Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis, and on Gunther Kress’ multimodal analysis. This is followed by examining the target texts (TTs) to investigate the inventible changes that occur during the translation process, particularly if the translation involves not only a transfer of meaning from Arabic to English but also from mode to mode (such as, speaking to writing) and genre to genre (a political speech to a newspaper article). The thesis introduces the Multimodal Translation Analysis model to investigate the following aspects of the TTs: linguistic aspects of the TTs, the TT’s multimodal qualities, and, drawing on Mona Baker’s narrative theory, the role of dominant narratives in the shaping of the TT.

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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.

When bilinguals process words in one of their languages, the words in their other language are also activated. This activation can be due to shared conceptual representations or to direct cross- linguistic links between the words at the lexical level. The nature of the activation is affected by the bilingual profile of the speaker, with more proficient L2 speakers activating conceptual representations directly while less proficient speakers arc more dependent on lexical level links. The aim of my research is to investigate the role of bilingual profile in the lexical organization of Arabic-English bilinguals. Bilingual profile refers to relative status of the two languages, which can depend on a number of factors for example, language dominance, age of acquisition and proficiency. In this thesis I test the lexical processing of Arabic-English bilinguals in masked and visible priming of lexical decision to written words. Arabic and English have different scripts and also differ in their morphological structure making them ideal languages for testing lexical level cross-linguistic activation. I examine the effect bilingual profile on the effect of morphological and semantically related Arabic primes and targets and the effect of Arabic morphological and translation primes on the processing of English targets.

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.

Background: Sentence Repetition (SR) is considered to be a good indicator of children’s grammatical knowledge. Cross-linguistic evidence suggests that performance on SR improves with age, differentiates children with language difficulties, and shows relationships with other language assessments. However, there is debate about the underlying skills involved in SR with few studies directly investigating the impact of linguistic manipulation on SR performance. In the absence of standardized language assessments and lack of normative data, and building on evidence from typologically diverse languages, SR provides a potentially useful assessment tool in Arabic. Aims: (1) To examine the clinical utility of a novel SR test and an adapted Verbal Short Term Memory (VSTM) test by investigating the psychometric properties of the tests and their sensitivity to age and language ability. (2) To evaluate the contribution of established linguistic knowledge to immediate repetition by comparing the patterns of performance across different linguistic factors 3) To determine whether patterns of performance are similar or dissimilar across different age groups of Typically Developing children and different language ability groups. Methods: Three immediate repetition tests were developed or adapted: (1) a novel SR test targeting morphosyntactic structures of Arabic; (2) an adapted VSTM test based on the structure of the Working Memory Test Battery for Children (WMTB-C; Pickering & Gathercole, 2001) with three subtests of Digit Recall, Word List Recall, and Nonword List Recall; and (3) an Anomalous Sentence Repetition (ASR) test including sets of Semantically Anomalous and Syntactically Anomalous sentences created from and matched to a subset of sentences in the SR test in target Lexical and Grammatical Morphemes as well as length. The SR and ASR tests were scored for the number of Lexical and Grammatical Morphemes repeated correctly. VSTM tests were scored based on the highest number of items repeated in correct order. The SR and VSTM tests were administered to Typically Developing Arabic-speaking children aged 2;6 to 5;11 (n = 140) and a Language Concerns group in the same age range (n = 16), matched on age and nonverbal IQ. The ASR test was only administered to participants older than 4 years. Results: The SR and VSTM tests were reliable, valid, and sensitive to age and language ability of participants. In the Typical sample a) Lexical Morphemes were easier to repeat than Grammatical Morphemes, (b) Digit span was higher than Word span and Word span was higher than Nonword span, and (c) Typical sentences were easier to repeat than Semantically Anomalous sentences followed by Syntactically Anomalous sentences. The gap between Digit and Word span, Grammatical and Lexical Morphemes in the SR test and Lexical Morphemes in Typical and Semantically Anomalous sentences showed a change with age. While performance was significantly reduced in the Language Concerns group, the profile of performance was largely similar. Like the younger children in the Typical sample, they showed a greater vulnerability in Grammatical Morphemes. Only four of 16 children in the clinical sample showed mismatches between their performance on the SR and VSTM tests. Conclusions: The study’s results are consistent with cross-linguistic evidence demonstrating that SR and VSTM tests are sensitive to developmental change and language difficulties and are informative about children’s language processing abilities. These findings lay the foundations for creating standardized assessments for Arabic-speaking preschool children.