Inspired by Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), this thesis reconsiders ‘the secular’ from within the discipline of literature and theology, employing comparative literature as a methodology. Focusing on the writings of two modern authors of religious doubt, Graham Greene and Naguib Mahfouz, I argue that the secular as an ontological category is from its inception post secular. In the first theoretical part of this thesis, I explore religious utopianism, and argue against the notion that utopianism is a uniquely ‘Western’ concept by outlining its prevalence in non Western societies. Then, I theorise modern intimations of the secular as four dichotomies: faith/reason, this worldliness/otherworldliness, personal/communal and freewill/determinism. In doing so,I draw parallels between ideas of the secular from Western philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche and classical Islamic thinkers like Ibn Sina and al-Farabi. Drawing from the concepts of ‘religious utopianism’ and ‘secular dichotomies’, I develop a comparative literary lens known as utopian theologics to explore secular narratives in the selected works of Greene and Mahfouz. The second part of this thesis applies utopian theologics, by first historicising the secular from the socio-political and biographical spheres of the two writers to map out their ‘lifeworlds’ in the Habermasian sense of the word. More elaborately, I embark on a close reading analysis of the selected works according to the dichotomies identified to explore the way their conventional hierarchical orders have been reversed, or rendered irrelevant by hybridisation. Finally, I conclude that the secular disposition, as intimated in the novels, falls apart when its polemics are investigated, though its sense of lasting realness in the modern world is fuelled by perceptions of religion’s seeming antithesis to the idea of human agency. The postsecular narratives that govern the selected works also suggest that humanity has an inclination for ‘sacred impulses’ despite the advent of ‘sacrilegious worlds’.

This study provides description and analysis of some verbal complementation patterns in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA), namely the Auxiliary /kaan/, Causative /xalla/, phasal verbs and modals. Each verb is represented by a set of sentences extracted from a 5 million word corpus of ECA online texts that was built for the purpose of the current study using the Sketch Engine tool. These verbal complements are described and analysed within the principles of LFG syntactic theory, and represented in a grammar fragment implemented using the XLE tool. The analysis shows that both tense and aspect can be expressed verbs in ECA, where in simple tense forms the verb carries tense only, while in compound tense, the main predicate marks tense and occupies I while the following lexical verb marks grammatical aspect and occupies V. The bi- prefix marks present tense on verbs in I and imperfect aspect on verbs in V, as well as a HAB/PROG feature. The bare Imperfective verb form is treated as a non-finite verb in ECA, where it can not occupy I and is marked by VFORM=BARE. All of the verbal constructions analysed are bi-clausal structures, however, they show differences regarding the kind of control relation. Functional control was attested in constructions where the main predicate is the auxiliary /kaan/, the causative verb /xalla/, phasal verbs, as well as non-inflecting modals. Anaphoric control was attested only with inflecting modals, with the modal /yi2dar/ ‘able’ showing a case of obligatory anaphoric control. This is, to my knowledge, the first study which attempts to develop a grammar for ECA using the XLE platform. It provides an insight over the issues correlated with developing this grammar, which could be a step towards including ECA into the ParGram project in order to develop broad coverage grammars for a bigger number of languages.

This study examines the quality of subtitles from English into Arabic. The motivation behind selecting this topic area is that subtitling of English language programmes into Arabic is under-researched. Therefore it is in need of further research in order to enhance subtitlers’ skills and performance. The study explores the main challenges that translators face in the subtitling of English language films into Arabic and addresses the key issues, by examining the common features hindering audio-visual translation and highlighting particular cultural limitations intrinsic to translation for Arabic speaking audiences, assuming that particular fundamentals of translation theory can be beneficial in overcoming the linguistics, technical and cultural challenges. A qualitative approach is adopted in the study. The rationale for adopting a qualitative research approach is related to the purpose of the study, the nature of the problem and research questions. Thus the study data have been collected using a thematic questionnaire for general viewers who are interested in watching subtitled programmes to gauge their perceptions on the current quality of English into Arabic subtitling. The findings of this study have practical contribution to enhance the quality of subtitling. They also benefit academic research through expanding the literature in the field of subtitling which in turn will benefit future researchers.

This study aims to better understand the realisation of grammatical tense and aspect in Maltese. We first consider the different temporal and aspectual interpretations related with the verbal and participial morphology. The main focus will then be the identification of different sorts of auxiliaries that contribute to the realisation of the morphosemantic tense and aspect features as they combine with one another and with lexical verbs and participles in periphrastic structures. The bleached semantics displayed by the forms to be discussed will be taken to be our primary identifier of an auxiliary status. Only one auxiliary expresses tense in the language, however a number of auxiliaries realize Viewpoint and Phasal aspect. The auxiliaries discussed range from invariable particles that simply realize feature-values to auxiliaries that display predicate-like behaviours, in that they are the semantic nucleus of their own clause. Three of the auxiliaries to be discussed are pseudo- verbs. While providing a much-needed account of their morphosyntactic behaviour, and what they bring to the overall constructions in which they are present, in terms of temporal and aspec- tual interpretations, we will for the first time posit that Maltese synchronically realizes perfect aspect through the use of at least two of these pseudo-verbal auxiliaries. The Lexical Functional Grammar framework will underlie this study’s morphosyntactic account, with which we aim to identify which syntactic analyses best account for the different auxiliaries as these combine with themselves and with other lexical predicates, particularly whether they come to form bi- or mono-tiered/clausal f-structures. The framework also underlies our quest in trying to better understand the (mis)matched behaviours that obtain across the morphology- semantic-syntax modules/levels of linguistic analysis, in the realm of the expression of tense and aspect in Maltese. We will see how in places, the morphological information expressed may even be contradictory to the interpretation expressed at the semantic level. This will compel us to argue that the yielded temporal and aspectual interpretations cannot always be taken to imply the realisation of tense/aspect values at the syntactic level.

This is a thesis in variationist sociolinguistics. It attempts to make a contribution to the study of a dialect of Arabic—Palestinian Arabic—spoken in a region where the population is gradually becoming engulfed in a language, which was once quite similar to Arabic, namely Hebrew, but has undergone drastic changes, particularly in its phonological structure, as a result of contact with European languages. Now, Modern Hebrew is acting as a colonizing language vis-à-vis Palestinian Arabic, and in this study we are exploring the effects the contact between the two languages on the phonology of Arabic in the town of Jaffa, where Arabic-speaking Palestinians and Hebrew-speaking Israeli Jews reside, perhaps not in harmony, but nonetheless in the same urban space. Employing quantitative methods for one linguistic variable and a sociohistorical analysis for another, we make the case that the two variables observed in this study are but a fragment of the entire complex. Examples from the data collected are provided and briefly analyzed, some of which are from other domains of the language, and these will be further explored at a later date.

This study examines language style of Arabic newspapers particularly in the world affairs and sport sections, using the word frequency analysis. The study is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter mainly focuses on background and aims of the study, while review of previous studies is presented in the second chapter. Chapter Three discusses Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), the selected newspapers and the chosen sections. Chapter Four concerns on the methodology applied in the study. Analysis of the language style is presented in Chapter five and followed by findings which are discussed in Chapter Six. The final chapter provides summary, conclusion and suggestions for further research. The study employed a self-constructed method in corpus building. A total of 30 articles (world affairs and sports) from seven Arabic newspapers were collected from the official online websites mostly in November 2007. Five of the newspapers are published in Arab countries and one in both the United Kingdom and Australia. The Wordsmith version 5.0 was used in analyzing the corpus data. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were employed to analyse word frequency list in both categories, while the Likelihood ratio test was applied in the comparison analysis. Findings revealed that most high frequency words have close relationship to their respective categories especially in the use of nouns. Slight differences were identified in terms of word spelling, loan word, verb transitivity and phrase amongst the newspapers published in different countries s. It is also proven that there is a tendency in MSA to practice new features in news writing which is different from the well known Arabic grammar, i.e, verb and subject agreement in gender. Different newspapers have also demonstrated their own focus in news reporting, and sports section is found to use more specific words than world affairs section.

The analyses in this thesis explore similarities and differences in Jewish (and later Jewish-Israeli) and British literary texts from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. The comparison is based on two connections between the two cultures: the first is the shared mythical roots, and the second the spatial and historical connection between the two cultures in relation to (post)colonialism. The research examines literary means that convey and consider alterity, and the manner in which the location of the monstrous Other is indicative of the relationship of the respective imagined community and sovereignty. This investigation focuses on the employment of certain Gothic tropes, specifically the use of the setting as a means of exploring and expressing individual and collective identities. A connection between the British and Jewish cultures surfaces in nineteenth to mid-twentieth century literary use of Gothic elements. Furthermore, the comparative analysis will show that the texts in Hebrew and English examined in this thesis similarly utilise Gothic tropes in order to explore concerns of modernity. This thesis re-establishes the inherent links between the Jewish and British cultures, which manifest in similar use of spatial metaphors and ancient myths for the exploration of the angst modernity. These similarities stem not only from the cultural connection, but are the result of the two nations’ preoccupation with sovereignty at an era when they underwent opposite processes of immigration and colonisation. Both literatures utilise Gothic tropes because the Gothic is a genre that is predominantly engaged with social critique and spatial awareness. The interplay between space, myth, and language is exposed as fundamental for the (re)construction of identities in relation to spatial awareness. These issues continue to be relevant in contemporary discussions of identities.

This is a sociolinguistic investigation that examines variation in the use of two ancient features in the Tihāmi Qaḥṭāni dialect as spoken in two villages (al-Jawwa in the highlands and al-Farša in the lowlands) in ʿAsīr, southwest Saudi Arabia. The data are analysed within the framework of the variationist sociolinguistic paradigm and subjected to statistical testing using Rbrul. In addition to ‘linguistic environment’, ‘age’ and ‘gender’ as independent variables, the study analyses the effect of geographical location on the structure of variation and the trajectory of language change. The first linguistic variable is phonological, the Arabic sound ḍād, and the second linguistic variable is morpho-phonological, definite article m-. The Tihāmi Qaḥṭāni dialect preserves ancient realisations of these features. This is a dialect that traditionally has a lateral realisation of ḍād, and m- definite article, both of which are ancient Semitic features. A total of twenty eight speakers were sampled from the two communities. The data were obtained through sociolinguistic interviews. The results show that there is considerable variation in the use of both variables. The structure of this variation is influenced by social, linguistic and spatial factors. The incoming variants, emphatic interdental fricative [ðˤ] for (ḍād) and l-article for m-article, are koine forms. In the case of ḍād, the quantitative analysis shows that it is undergoing change towards [ðˤ]. This change is led by younger women in both communities, while men in general and older women lag behind. Analysis of m-article shows change in progress in the lowland community only (al-Farša). In this case too, the younger women are found to be in the lead. The qualitative analysis of the data shows that ambition, attitudes, tribal identity and mobility influence variation in the use of the traditional features. The analysis underlines the benefits of quantitative sociolinguistic methods towards understanding historical linguistic developments.

This thesis has two aims: developing resources for Arabic dialects and improving the speech recognition of Arabic dialects. Two important components are considered: Pronunciation Dictionary (PD) and Language Model (LM). Six parts are involved, which relate to building and evaluating dialects resources and improving the performance of systems for the speech recognition of dialects. Three resources are built and evaluated: one tool and two corpora. The methodology that was used for building the multi-dialect morphology analyser involves the proposal and evaluation of linguistic and statistic bases. We obtained an overall accuracy of 94%. The dialect text corpora have four sub-dialects, with more than 50 million tokens. The multi-dialect speech corpora have 32 speech hours, which were collected from 52 participants. The resultant speech corpora have more than 67,000 speech files. The main objective is improvement in the PDs and LMs of Arabic dialects. The use of incremental methodology made it possible to check orthography and phonology rules incrementally. We were able to distinguish the rules that positively affected the PDs. The Word Error Rate (WER) improved by an accuracy of 5.3% in MSA and 5% in Levantine. Three levels of morphemes were used to improve the LMs of dialects: stem, prefix+stem and stem+suffix. We checked the three forms using two different types of LMs. Eighteen experiments are carried out on MSA, Gulf dialect and Egyptian dialect, all of which yielded positive results, showing that WERs were reduced by 0.5% to 6.8%.

This thesis addresses the problem of fine-grained NER for Arabic, which poses unique linguistic challenges to NER; such as the absence of capitalisation and short vowels, the complex morphology, and the highly in infection process. Instead of classifying the detected NE phrases into small sets of classes, we target a broader range (i.e. 50 fine-grained classes 'hierarchal-based of two levels') to increase the depth of the semantic knowledge extracted. This has increased the number of classes, complicating the task, when compared with traditional (coarse-grained) NER, because of the increase in the number of semantic classes and the decrease in semantic differences between fine-grained classes. Our approach to developing fine-grained NER relies on two different supervised Machine Learning (ML) technologies (i.e. Maximum Entropy 'ME' and Conditional Random Fields 'CRF'), which require annotated training data in order to learn by extracting informative features. We develop a methodology which exploit the richness of Arabic Wikipedia (A W) in order to create a scalable fine-grained lexical resource and a corpus automatically. Moreover, two gold-standard created corpora from different genres were also developed to perform comparable evaluation. The thesis also developed a new approach to feature representation by relying on the dependency structure of the sentence to overcome the limitation of traditional window-based (i.e. n-gram) representation. Furthermore, by exploiting the richness of unannotated textual data to extract global informative features using word-level clustering technique was also achieved. Each contribution was evaluated via controlled experiment and reported using three commonly applied metrics, i.e. precision, recall and harmonic F-measure.