Papers by Abdallah Alshdaifat
Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Mar 2, 2023
This study examines the major phonological features of Jordanian Druze Arabic (JD). Druze are a m... more This study examines the major phonological features of Jordanian Druze Arabic (JD). Druze are a minority group in the east part of Jordan. Their dialect has not been investigated before. First, we give a brief history of the socio-cultural background of the Druze. Then we investigate selected melodic and prosodic processes to be reported for this dialect: including syllable structure, assimilation (definite article assimilation, sonorant assimilation, non-coronal assimilation), emphasis spread, syncope, resolution, umlaut, and raising. Druze use these features most frequently. However, the raising process is the most dominant feature among them.
I dedicate this thesis with love to my dear parents. xii Declaration I declare that this thesis w... more I dedicate this thesis with love to my dear parents. xii Declaration I declare that this thesis was the result of my own work. No portion of the work covered in this thesis has been submitted in support of any application for another degree or qualification at this or any other university or institution of higher learning.
Theory and Practice in Language Studies
This study examines the major phonological features of Jordanian Druze Arabic (JD). Druze are a m... more This study examines the major phonological features of Jordanian Druze Arabic (JD). Druze are a minority group in the east part of Jordan. Their dialect has not been investigated before. First, we give a brief history of the socio-cultural background of the Druze. Then we investigate selected melodic and prosodic processes to be reported for this dialect: including syllable structure, assimilation (definite article assimilation, sonorant assimilation, non-coronal assimilation), emphasis spread, syncope, resolution, umlaut, and raising. Druze use these features most frequently. However, the raising process is the most dominant feature among them.
Humanities & social sciences communications, Jan 30, 2023
The aim of the present study is to investigate the use of discourse markers (DMs) in the argument... more The aim of the present study is to investigate the use of discourse markers (DMs) in the argumentative compositions written by EFL learners at two academic stages (sophomores and seniors) majoring in English at the Hashemite University, Jordan. The significance of this study springs from its focus on the use of DMs in Jordanian EFL learners' argumentative writings. Employing an integrated research method of qualitative and quantitative analysis, the findings revealed that both groups of participants used the same types of DMs with varying degree of frequency, namely, elaborative, contrastive, reason, inferential, conclusive, and exemplifier DMs, respectively. The sophomores were observed to employ a relatively higher number of DMs compared to the seniors, which may be ascribed to some redundant instances of DMs. The elaborative, contrastive, and reason types were the most widely used, while inferentials, conclusives and exemplifiers appeared infrequently in both groups. The analysis of individual DMs displayed that the DMs 'and', 'because', and 'but' were the predominant across the seniors and sophomores' argumentative texts. This overuse of these DMs may be due to the influence of L1 of the participants and the popularity of these DMs among students and teachers of English. Additionally, the participants showed a low proficiency in using DMs since they overused largely a restricted variety of DMs at the expense of others that would be expected in the argumentative writing; some DMs were noticed either to be underused or absent. The results of Pearson's r correlation test indicated that there was a weak positive but significant correlation between the writing quality and the use of DMs. This may be taken as a predictor of the writing quality in argumentative compositions by EFL. Pedagogically, the study emphasizes the significance of teaching DMs, where EFL learners should be taught how to use them appropriately to avoid any transference of their L1. Further research on DMs in argumentative writings in different levels of proficiency is recommended.
The Semantic Behaviour of Verbs of Emotion in Arabic
Dirasat: Human and Social Sciences, Jun 4, 2021
دراسات - العلوم الإنسانية والاجتماعية, 2020
This paper investigates patterns of morphological repetition in Arabic demonstrated in folk songs... more This paper investigates patterns of morphological repetition in Arabic demonstrated in folk songs, including suffixes, roots and patterns. It also analyzes the functions of the reported repetitions, and examines the interaction between morphological repetition and phonological repetition, represented via rhyme. To supply the data, multiple examples are retrieved from twenty Jordanian folk songs. A statistical analysis is conducted to obtain a frequency distribution and to calculate the percentage of suffix repetitions on the rhyming lines; the selected lines are transcribed and translated. The study proves that folk poetry relies heavily on Arabic morphology, especially suffixation, to illuminate its rhetorical, prosodic and emphatic effects. The results show that suffix repetition occurs most frequently (34.14%), followed by root repetition (25.85%) and pattern repetition (15.28%). The percentage of rhyming lines affected by suffix repetition and final word pattern in each hemistich registered (30.46%) and (45%), respectively. The results confirm that rhyming in folk poetry is not produced haphazardly by the articulation of repeated sounds; instead, it is structured by means of systematic morphological repetition which promotes the theory that repetition is inherently a prosodic device in Arabic. Contrary to the model proposed by Shoubi (1951), which introduces repetition as a negative exaggeration and over assertion, this work proves that repetition is a productive strategy at several linguistic levels, provoked to satisfy the immediate requirements of the language in each context.
دراسات - العلوم الإنسانية والاجتماعية, 2020
This study investigated the cognitive relevance of typological universal grammar in second langua... more This study investigated the cognitive relevance of typological universal grammar in second language acquisition. It addressed whether constraints that hold for primary languages hold also for interlanguages. To answer this question, two Greenbergian implicational universals were tested on the mental grammar of nine Javanese-Indonesian learners of Jordanian Arabic. Results revealed that none of the participants acquired gender agreements in Arabic verb phrases (i.e. the marked pattern) without acquiring number agreements (the unmarked pattern). Similarly, participants' level of accuracy for subject-verb (SV) number agreements (i.e. the unmarked pattern) was similar to or higher than their level of accuracy for verb-subject (VS) number agreements (i.e. the marked pattern). The research findings were discussed in view of Eckman's Structure Conformity Hypothesis (1991).
Proceedings of the Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, 2019
To compile a modern dictionary that catalogues the words in currency, and to study linguistic pat... more To compile a modern dictionary that catalogues the words in currency, and to study linguistic patterns in the contemporary language, it is necessary to have a corpus of authentic texts that reflect current usage of the language. Although there are numerous Arabic corpora, none claims to be representative of the language in terms of the combination of geographical region, genre, subject matter, mode, and medium. This paper describes a 100-million-word corpus that takes the British National Corpus (BNC) as a model. The aim of the corpus is to be balanced, annotated, comprehensive, and representative of contemporary Arabic as written and spoken in Arab countries today. It will be different from most others in not being heavily-dominated by the news or in mixing the classical with the modern. In this paper is an outline of the methodology adopted for the design, construction, and annotation of this corpus. DIWAN (Al-Shargi and Rambow, 2015) was used to annotate a one-million-word snapshot of the corpus. DI-WAN is a dialectal word annotation tool, but we upgraded it by adding a new tag-set that is based on traditional Arabic grammar and by adding the roots and morphological patterns of nouns and verbs. Moreover, the corpus we constructed covers the major spoken varieties of Arabic.
International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, 2017
This paper aims to analyze the use of cohesion in Arabic and English religious spoken texts. Twel... more This paper aims to analyze the use of cohesion in Arabic and English religious spoken texts. Twelve texts, delivered by some of the most eloquent Imams, were analyzed in light of the model proposed by Halliday & Hasan (1976). The study reveals that lexical cohesion is the most dominant type of cohesion in Arabic religious discourse, whereas it is grammatical cohesion which dominates English religious discourse. Although both languages prefer the use of reference, conjunctions and lexical repetition, Arabic uses lexical repetition, collocation and personal pronouns more often than English. A major contribution of the present study is that it captures new cohesive devises employed in Arabic religious discourse other than proposed by Halliday & Hasan (1976): rhyming patterns and parallelism.
The word-formation of the instrumental noun in Arabic
This study investigates the formation of nominal derivatives in Arabic by providing a multi-level... more This study investigates the formation of nominal derivatives in Arabic by providing a multi-level analysis in the light of state-of-the-art theories and approaches in modern linguistics. Six types of nominal derivative are described and analyzed: the active participle, the passive participle, the form of exaggeration, the instrumental noun, the qualificative adjective, and the locative noun. The study considers the Form I verb stem as input for forming the six types of nominal derivative (the output). A multi-level approach is employed, involving semantics, syntax, morphology and prosodic phonology. The study establishes an Arabic verb classification in which 980 Form I verbs are divided into 44 classes from which nominal derivatives are derived. Verbs are allocated to classes according to their semantic features and syntactic behaviour. Semantically, the verbs in each class share related meanings and semantic functions. In addition, semantic relations such as synonyms, antonyms, po...
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Papers by Abdallah Alshdaifat