Linguistics

The linguistic element ‫؟‬adi is extensively employed in the variety of Arabic spoken in Iraq to aid in communication and facilitate the cohesion and flow of conversation. ‫؟‬adi which roughly means no worries, okay, how dare you?, yeah I hear you, or I've gone through the same thing myself, displays properties typically displayed by discourse markers. For example, it occurs phrase-initially or phrase-finally, it is a grammatically optional lexical item, it is multi-functional and it is an essential feature of spontaneous oral discourse … oral-rather than formal written-discourse among Iraqi speakers of Arabic. The aim of this paper is to investigate the use of ‫؟‬adi, its distribution and its varied context-dependent meanings and functions. The description and investigation are based largely on speech samples which the author recorded. These recordings were then transcribed and analyzed in order to identify the functions associated with ‫؟‬adi from a discourse analytical perspective.

This paper provides evidence, based on the Case properties of verbless copular clauses in Standard Arabic (SA), against the Multiple Agreement Hypothesis proposed for languages such as Japanese (Hiraiwa, 2001), English (Chomsky, 2005b; Radford, 2006), and SA double-accusative structures (Al-Horais, 2013). It argues that the mismatch in Case value between the two nominal constituents-the DP "subject" and the DP or AP predicate-of verbless copular clauses is incompatible with the claim that a single probe can simultaneously agree with more than one goal. Rather, the Case phenomenon within the copular contexts considered appears to be consistent with, and follows from, an Agree relation between a single active probe and a single active matching goal. Some SA copular clauses which include a modal-like negative element-laysa-will also be used to address the key issue under investigation.

This paper investigates the linguistic element ya‫؟‬ni frequently found in the variety of Arabic spoken in Iraq. ya‫؟‬ni belongs to a host of expressions known as discourse markers, pragmatic markers, discourse connectives, pragmatic particles and discourse operators. Some examples in English speech are: so, well, you know, oh, OK, like, you see, I mean , actually and right; examples in writing would be because, however, to sum up, admittedly, to begin, now, then and on the other hand. ya‫؟‬ni performs numerous functions in naturally occurring conversational Iraqi Arabic in different contexts. It may serve to fill gaps, indicate agreement, soften criticism, direct statements, and to modify and clarify information and intentions. The use of these forms will be investigated using natural spoken conversation. METHODOLOGY This paper is based on the analysis of recorded spoken conversation by native speakers of Iraqi Arabic. I recorded the conversations of pairs of speakers and also conducted interviews with 10 other native speakers. Some were face-to-face conversations consisting of private dialogues which were used to identify the functions of the DM ya‫؟‬ni. All of these recordings were then transcribed and analyzed. The corpus was compiled and then searched for examples of the DM ya‫؟‬ni. Through analyzing this natural conversational variety of Arabic, the functions, meanings and roles of ya‫؟‬ni were identified. Translation Technique The translation technique is also used in this analysis as it is a useful strategy to illuminate the subtle, underlying and multi-layered context-dependent communicative meanings and purposes of the DM under investigation. In the process of translating, a three-pronged approach is adopted to analyze ya‫؟‬ni on a semantic, textual, and pragmatic level. Within such an approach-translating the Arabic utterances into English in different ways and contexts in order to illuminate ya‫؟‬ni's various meanings and to identify its functions-makes the utterances more comprehensible to English readers. Such a technique is also used by Brinton (2007) in the study of the English pragmatic marker I mean where it is translated into markers with a somewhat transparent form and function correlation such as because, in other words, namely and for example. Aijmer & Simon-Vandenbergen (2004), in their analysis of Swedish and Dutch equivalents of English markers-actually, in fact and really-used the method of translation (English into Swedish and Dutch and back into English) to highlight the meaning encoded by such markers. These authors state that the translation method "provides rich details about both the

This paper deals withnoun phrases that appear in two embedded structures in Iraqi Arabic. The structures are termed Exceptional Case-marking (ECM) and Left-dislocation (LD).The analysis is stated within a non-minimalist framework, specifically within the Principles and Parameters Syntax and its predecessorthe Government and Binding framework of Chomsky (1981) and subsequent work. It will be argued that the noun phases under investigation are both adjoined to CP and to TP respectively. However, they exhibit a number of contrasting properties such as the type of complementizer, the nature of the matrix verb under which these noun phrases are embedded. It will be argued that this collection of apparently unrelated properties can in fact be derived from the interaction of various sub-theories of universal grammar, among them, government, Case theory, theta theory, and the binding theory.It will be proposed that ECM is adjunction of NP within CP, LD is adjunction of NP within TP, ECM Case assignment is from a governing matrix verbal head and LD Case assignment is from a governing functional head, a complementizer.

present work investigates the CP layer in Standard Arabic (SA); specifically, the nature and position of topicalized and object focused phrases in the left periphery. The paper also seeks to establish that in fact subjects, like objects and obliques, can also topicalize, the difference being that the pronoun is optionally lexically expressed in subject-topicalization. The 'Subject' initial-DP will be treated as a topic located high up in the clausal structure-in the specifier position of the Top node above Foc. Elements in this position fill a special pragmatic sense and discourse role of being presumed, given and identifiable topics rather than an argument or a thematic function. Building on Rizzi's (2004) and Ouhalla's (1997) proposals that generate moved objects and wh-phrases in [Spec, Foc], two focus positions will be posited for SA-one is located immediately above vP and the second is right below TopP. It will be proposed that object movement over the subject is triggered by the [F] feature on Foc and derives the VOS order. Triggered by the higher [F] feature, the raised object and the raised wh-word can raise again to the higher [Spec, Foc]. It is concluded that the position occupied by topicalized DP's differs from that of focused DP's. In particular, SA topics occupy a higher position in the left periphery, namely [Spec, TopP].

This paper argues that the CP (Complementizer Phrase) clause structure of standard Arabic shows a split in all clausal stages in the sense of Rizzi (1997, 2004). In Rizzi's system, there is a Finiteness (Fin) node dominated by a Topic (Top) node which is dominated by a Focus (Foc) node. The Foc node is dominated by another Top node which is in turn dominated by the Force node heading the entire clausal structure-the Force Phrase (ForceP). The present work seeks to establish such a parallel articulation of the left periphery of the clause in Standard Arabic as comprising such functional categories as Topic, Focus and Finiteness, highlighting in the meantime the role of Topics in 'higher predication' in the clause structure of Standard Arabic. The proposed decomposed CP of Standard Arabic will be motivated by data from sentences displaying the Sbject-Verb-Object (SVO) order, specifically topicalized/clitic left-dislocation structures. These constructions provide evidence for a decomposed CP and for the correlated Topic and Focus interpretation at the interface level.

Discourse markers are items (such as and, so, anyway, but, on the other hand, however) that link spans of discourse and signal various semantic and pragmatic relations. Thus, they play an important role in the cohesiveness, organization and interpretation of discourse. 1 Arabic has a number of devices which play a pivotal role in the cohesion and coherence of written and spoken discourse such as wa, aw, lakin, am, fa, thuma, bal, la, etc. The present paper is limited in scope. It is an attempt to establish the constituency and identify the functions of the Arabic discourse connective device wa using resources of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Such resources include descriptive and analytical diagnostic tools of constituency tests, structural ambiguity and semantic roles.

The lexical item yamawwad ‫ﻳﻤﻌﻮد‬ is a functional discourse unit with several different functions that are dependent upon context. This makes its function difficult to define since it varies with context but, at the same time, it is a topic of great interest in the study of discourse, pragmatics and speech acts. To my knowledge, this marker has hitherto not been analyzed. The material used in this paper comes from dyadic conversations that were written and transcribed. The range of contexts where yamawwad occurs were identified and then classified into sections according to the various contextual meanings and functions of this pragmatic marker.

Unlike displaced lexical DP objects in Standard Arabic (SA) syntax, displaced pronominal objects, however, have received less critical attention especially within Rizzi’s (1997, 2004) left periphery theory and, therefore, some areas of this constructions remain poorly understood. The present paper examines pronominal object cliticization in SA, the status of the clitic, the derivation of the process and the reasons behind its obligatory movement. The analysis is couched within Minimalist Syntax (Chomsky 2001, 2005) and Split CP (Rizzi, 1997, 2004) to explain the motivation for this movement and its landing site. To achieve the aim of the study, a questionnaire containing samples of the studied structures were presented to five native speakers of Arabic who were asked to provide grammaticality judgments. It is suggested that, in this context, the object clitic can be analyzed as undergoing focus movement as a separate verbal complement like a full DP with an additional cliticization ...

This paper argues that the CP (Complementizer Phrase) clause structure of standard Arabic shows a split in all clausal stages in the sense of Rizzi (1997, 2004). In Rizzi’s system, there is a Finiteness (Fin) node dominated by a Topic (Top) node which is dominated by a Focus (Foc) node. The Foc node is dominated by another Top node which is in turn dominated by the Force node heading the entire clausal structure - the Force Phrase (ForceP). The present work seeks to establish such a parallel articulation of the left periphery of the clause in Standard Arabic as comprising such functional categories as Topic, Focus and Finiteness, highlighting in the meantime the role of Topics in ‘higher predication’ in the clause structure of Standard Arabic. The proposed decomposed CP of Standard Arabic will be motivated by data from sentences displaying the Sbject-Verb-Object (SVO) order, specifically topicalized/clitic left-dislocation structures. These constructions provide evidence for a decom...

This study aims at identifying the common types of errors in Google Translate (GT) in the translation of informative news texts from Arabic to English, to measure the translation errors quality and to assess the fluency and the semantic adequacy of the translation output, and therefore to explain the extent a human translator is needed to rectify the output translation. For this purpose, some examples were purposively selected from online newspapers. The collected data was analyzed using a mixed method approach, as the errors were qualitatively identified, guided by Hsu’s (2014) classification of machine translation errors. Quantitative descriptive approach was used to measure the translation errors quality, using the Multidimensional Quality Metrics and Localization Quality Evaluation. As for assessing the semantic adequacy and fluency, a questionnaire that was adapted from Dorr, Snover, and Madnani (2011) was used. The results of the analysis show that omission, which is a lexical...