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Zeyad Al-Daher

Al-Balqa Applied University, English Language and literature, Faculty Member

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My work is couched within the Minimalist Program with special focus on A-bar movement, the cartography of the left periphery, and clitic doubling in different Arabic varieties. I am also interested in sociolinguistics in general with special focus on Arabic-English code switching.

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University of Zagreb

Uppsala University

University of East London

University of Leicester

Gwen Robbins Schug

University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Gabriel Gutierrez-Alonso

University of Salamanca

Macquarie University

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Swansea University

Jesper Hoffmeyer

University of Copenhagen

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Papers by Zeyad Al-Daher

The Instrumentality of Integrativeness: A Case Study of ESL Saudi Students in Canada

Jordan Journal of Modern Languages and Literatures, 2020

This study looks into the orientations and attitudes of ESL Saudi students enrolled in the Intens... more This study looks into the orientations and attitudes of ESL Saudi students enrolled in the Intensive English Program (IEP) at the University of Manitoba (U of M), Canada. Little research has tackled the orientations and attitudes of Arab ESL students in a native-speaking context. The researchers expect that living in the native social, cultural context of Canada will create more positive attitudes towards Canadians, their culture and society, as well as higher integrative orientation on part of Saudi students. The subjects of this study were 17 Saudi students (11 males and 6 females). An attitudinal questionnaire was used to elicit the participants’ attitudes towards Canadians and the Canadian culture as well as the participants’ motivation for learning ESL. The data analysis revealed strong favorable attitudes towards Canadians as well as towards their culture. This positiveness was attributed to the native environment in which the learning process is taking place. Moreover, Saudi ...

Congratulation Strategies by Jordanians on a Royal Birthday Facebook Status

Journal of Language Teaching and Research

The current paper investigates the congratulation speech act among Jordanian Facebook users in te... more The current paper investigates the congratulation speech act among Jordanian Facebook users in terms of patterns and linguistic forms with reference to the congratulation strategies adopted in response to a birthday Facebook status posted on the occasion of the 60th birthday of His Majesty King Abdullah II Ibn Al-Hussein. The types of positive politeness strategies attested in these congratulatory forms are also tackled in this study. The comments posted by Jordanian Facebook users on this occasion formed the data necessary for the purpose of this study. The data analysis revealed that the dominant congratulation strategy among Jordanian Facebookers is Illocutionary force indicating device, and the use of proverbs and sayings is the least used strategy. As for the strategies of politeness in the congratulatory forms among Jordanian Facebook users, the data analysis revealed that the dominant strategies are giving gifts to the listener and in-group identity marker (usage of address f...

Code-Switching to English amongst Arabic-speaking Jordanians in Canada

Jordan Journal of Modern Languages and Literatures, 2021

Language contact leads to a number of linguistic phenomena, most noticeably code-switching, which... more Language contact leads to a number of linguistic phenomena, most noticeably code-switching, which refers to bilinguals’ utilization of two languages in the same conversation and even within a single utterance. This study investigates Arabic-English code-switching among Jordanian immigrants in Manitoba, Canada and presents a qualitative analysis of the socio-pragmatic functions this linguistic behavior serves. The participants were 11 (3 females and 8 males) Jordanian immigrants living in Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba. Two instruments were employed to elicit the data necessary for this study: audio recordings and semi-structured interviews. The code-switching occurrences were categorized into different socio-pragmatic functions based on the analysis of the content of almost 18 hours of recorded conversations. The analysis of the content of the audio-recordings besides the semi-structured interviews showed that Jordanian immigrants resort to code-switching to achieve a number of s...

Pseudo Wh-Fronting: A Diagnosis of Wh-Constructions in Jordanian Arabic

University of Manitoba, 2016

This thesis provides an in-depth analysis of wh-question formation in Jordanian Arabic (JA) and p... more This thesis provides an in-depth analysis of wh-question formation in Jordanian Arabic (JA) and presents a uniform approach that can accommodate all of its various wh-constructions. JA makes use of five different wh-constructions, four of which involve clause-initial whphrases and the fifth is a typical in-situ wh-construction. Although wh-phrases surface clauseinitially in four different wh-constructions in JA, I propose that bona fide wh-movement to [Spec, CP] does not occur in any of these constructions, whether overtly in syntax or covertly at LF. I abandon the classification of JA as a wh-movement language (Abdel Razaq 2011) and focus instead on identifying the syntactic role that wh-phrases realize and the underlying structures that feed each wh-construction. I propose that the clause-initial position of the whphrase results either from the syntactic function that the wh-phrase serves or from other syntactic operations that are independently attested in JA. There are three clause-initial positions that the wh-phrase can occupy: it surfaces in [Spec, TP] when functioning as the subject of a verbal or verbless structure, in [Spec, TopP] when functioning as a clitic-leftdislocated element (as in CLLD questions and ʔilli-interrogatives involving PRON), or in [Spec, FocP] when undergoing focus fronting. Thus, all instances of clause-initial wh-phrases in JA constitute what I refer to as-pseudo wh-fronting‖, as the clause-initial position of the wh-phrase arises from mechanisms other than canonical wh-movement to [Spec, CP]. To account for the interpretation of wh-phrases in JA, I adopt a binding approach in which a null interrogative morpheme (Baker 1970; Pesetsky 1987; Chomsky 1995) unselectively binds the wh-phrase regardless of its surface position, whether clause-initial or clause-internal (in-situ). A major implication of this analysis is that JA is a concealed wh-in-situ language of the Chinese type although it looks at a cursory glance as though it were a wh-movement language of the English type. A broader typological implication of my analysis is the convergence of Cheng's (1991) Clausal Typing Hypothesis to which JA previously appeared to constitute a counterexample. The recognition of the null interrogative particle, or its optional overt realization as the Q-particle huwweh, as the locus of interrogative clause typing in all JA wh-questions entails that JA employs just one unique strategy to type a clause as a wh-question, as predicted by Cheng's Clausal Typing Hypothesis, regardless of whether the wh-phrase surfaces clause-initially or clause-internally.

The Instrumentality of Integrativeness: A Case Study of ESL  Saudi Students in Canada

Jordan Journal of Modern Languages and Literatures, 2020

This study looks into the orientations and attitudes of ESL Saudi students enrolled in the Intens... more This study looks into the orientations and attitudes of ESL Saudi students enrolled in the Intensive English Program (IEP) at the University of Manitoba (U of M), Canada. Little research has tackled the orientations and attitudes of Arab ESL students in a native-speaking context. The researchers expect that living in the native social, cultural context of Canada will create more positive attitudes towards Canadians, their culture and society, as well as higher integrative orientation on part of Saudi students. The subjects of this study were 17 Saudi students (11 males and 6 females). An attitudinal questionnaire was used to elicit the participants' attitudes towards Canadians and the Canadian culture as well as the participants' motivation for learning ESL. The data analysis revealed strong favorable attitudes towards Canadians as well as towards their culture. This positiveness was attributed to the native environment in which the learning process is taking place. Moreover, Saudi students exhibited a combination of both integrative and instrumental motivation to learn the target language.

Code-Switching to English amongst Arabic-speaking Jordanians in Canada

Jordan Journal of Modern Languages and Literatures, 2021

Language contact leads to a number of linguistic phenomena, most noticeably code-switching, which... more Language contact leads to a number of linguistic phenomena, most noticeably code-switching, which refers to bilinguals' utilization of two languages in the same conversation and even within a single utterance. This study investigates Arabic-English code-switching among Jordanian immigrants in Manitoba, Canada and presents a qualitative analysis of the socio-pragmatic functions this linguistic behavior serves. The participants were 11 (3 females and 8 males) Jordanian immigrants living in Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba. Two instruments were employed to elicit the data necessary for this study: audio recordings and semi-structured interviews. The code-switching occurrences were categorized into different socio-pragmatic functions based on the analysis of the content of almost 18 hours of recorded conversations. The analysis of the content of the audio-recordings besides the semi-structured interviews showed that Jordanian immigrants resort to code-switching to achieve a number of sociopragmatic functions: filling lexical needs, integrating into the Canadian culture and lifestyle, qualifying a message, mitigating embarrassment and negative connotations, quoting the exact words of somebody, and creating humorous or ironic effect.

Morphology of COVID-19 Neologisms in Modern Standard Arabic

Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2022

This study investigates the morphological behavior of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in terms of de... more This study investigates the morphological behavior of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in terms of developing neologisms related to the new requirements imposed by the outbreak of COVID-19. The data of the study was collected from the news reports of Al-Mamlakah TV, as being the most viewed channel in Jordan during the COVID-19 crisis. The findings of the study revealed that a majority of the collected neologisms were nouns, which provided further support to the theory of onomasiology (Štekauer, 1998). Compounding, borrowing (loan-translation, Arabicization, and hybridization), and semantic extension formed the major word-formation processes for creating such neologisms. Compounds fell into three categories depending on their internal structures N+Adj, N+N, and more elaborate complex compounds. The first two types were discussed in terms of their headedness and internal syntactic structure with a special reference to the cross-linguistic criteria that were used to identify such compound constructs, whereas the analysis advanced for the third type was inspired by Carstairs-McCarthy (2017). The data analysis revealed interesting aspects in the morphology of COVID-19 neologisms, most noticeably, the higher productivity of (N+N) compounds than (N+Adj) compounds, which goes against the putative assumption that the latter is much commoner in Arabic, identifying new compound types in MSA, namely, N+A metaphoric compounds and N+N hybridized compounds, and the possibility of having newly created three-member complex compounds (i.e., compounds within compounds). © 2022 EJAL & the Authors.

Congratulation Strategies by Jordanians on a Royal Birthday Facebook Status

Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 2022

The current paper investigates the congratulation speech act among Jordanian Facebook users in te... more The current paper investigates the congratulation speech act among Jordanian Facebook users in terms of patterns and linguistic forms with reference to the congratulation strategies adopted in response to a birthday Facebook status posted on the occasion of the 60 th birthday of His Majesty King Abdullah II Ibn Al-Hussein. The types of positive politeness strategies attested in these congratulatory forms are also tackled in this study. The comments posted by Jordanian Facebook users on this occasion formed the data necessary for the purpose of this study. The data analysis revealed that the dominant congratulation strategy among Jordanian Facebookers is Illocutionary force indicating device, and the use of proverbs and sayings is the least used strategy. As for the strategies of politeness in the congratulatory forms among Jordanian Facebook users, the data analysis revealed that the dominant strategies are giving gifts to the listener and in-group identity marker (usage of address forms); exaggerate and seek agreement (safe topic) strategies are the least used ones. These results were discussed in light of the theory of speech act (Austin, 1962) and the theory of politeness (Brown & Levinson, 1987). The religious beliefs, cultural values, and social norms of the Facebook users appeared to be influential with respect to these politeness and congratulation strategies. The study also touches upon several aspects related to the pragmatic competence of Jordanian Facebook users.

COVID-19 Humor on Jordanian Social Media: A Diagnosis of Written Jokes on Facebook

by Zeyad Al-Daher and Othman A-Dala'Ien

Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2022

This study investigates COVID-19 jokes created and circulated on Jordanian social media during th... more This study investigates COVID-19 jokes created and circulated on Jordanian social media during the period between March to October 2020. The jokes used in this study were collected from several Facebook accounts. The study presents a content analysis and a linguistic analysis of 197 COVID-19 jokes in terms of the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) (Attardo, 1994, 2001; Attardo & Raskin, 1991) with the goal of uncovering the thematic and structural aspects of these jokes. A mixed quantitative and qualitative approach was adopted for the data analysis. The jokes were categorized into eight major groups and subgroups depending on the themes they target. Various topics featured in these jokes: ethnic jokes, government decisions, effects of restrictions, sexist jokes, the virus, miscellaneous offensive jokes, the year 2020, and remote education. The linguistic analysis of the jokes revealed that they obey the six Knowledge Resources of the GTVH. Moreover, it was found that lexical relations (I.e., synonymy, antonymy, Homophony) as well as wordplay (i.e., pun, metaphor, prosody) are crucial strategies in forming such jokes. This paper contributes to the literature on dark or disaster humor and furthers our understanding of jocular discourse during global crises.

An Analysis of Compliment Response Strategies by Jordanian Adolescent Students: The Influence of Gender and Social Power

Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2022

This study highlights the compliment response strategies of Jordanian adolescent students, and di... more This study highlights the compliment response strategies of Jordanian adolescent students, and discusses the respective influences of gender and social power on the production of these strategies. The participants were 37 male and 37 female Jordanian adolescent students at private secondary schools in Amman, with ages ranging from 14–16. They responded to eight discourse completion test situations translated into Arabic to ensure the participants’ understanding. These eight scenarios resembled academic situations which students might face in their daily life, and were intended to represent interactions with persons of different social standing/power. The resulting data were analysed based on the classification system found in previous research. The results revealed that both male and female participants preferred to accept compliments over using non-acceptance strategies. The most frequent strategies used by both groups were combination strategies and acceptance strategies, while no...

The Impact of Learning Foreign Languages on the Psychology of Students at Yarmouk University

The Instrumentality of Integrativeness: A Case Study of ESL Saudi Students in Canada

Jordan Journal of Modern Languages and Literatures, 2020

This study looks into the orientations and attitudes of ESL Saudi students enrolled in the Intens... more This study looks into the orientations and attitudes of ESL Saudi students enrolled in the Intensive English Program (IEP) at the University of Manitoba (U of M), Canada. Little research has tackled the orientations and attitudes of Arab ESL students in a native-speaking context. The researchers expect that living in the native social, cultural context of Canada will create more positive attitudes towards Canadians, their culture and society, as well as higher integrative orientation on part of Saudi students. The subjects of this study were 17 Saudi students (11 males and 6 females). An attitudinal questionnaire was used to elicit the participants’ attitudes towards Canadians and the Canadian culture as well as the participants’ motivation for learning ESL. The data analysis revealed strong favorable attitudes towards Canadians as well as towards their culture. This positiveness was attributed to the native environment in which the learning process is taking place. Moreover, Saudi ...

Congratulation Strategies by Jordanians on a Royal Birthday Facebook Status

Journal of Language Teaching and Research

The current paper investigates the congratulation speech act among Jordanian Facebook users in te... more The current paper investigates the congratulation speech act among Jordanian Facebook users in terms of patterns and linguistic forms with reference to the congratulation strategies adopted in response to a birthday Facebook status posted on the occasion of the 60th birthday of His Majesty King Abdullah II Ibn Al-Hussein. The types of positive politeness strategies attested in these congratulatory forms are also tackled in this study. The comments posted by Jordanian Facebook users on this occasion formed the data necessary for the purpose of this study. The data analysis revealed that the dominant congratulation strategy among Jordanian Facebookers is Illocutionary force indicating device, and the use of proverbs and sayings is the least used strategy. As for the strategies of politeness in the congratulatory forms among Jordanian Facebook users, the data analysis revealed that the dominant strategies are giving gifts to the listener and in-group identity marker (usage of address f...

Code-Switching to English amongst Arabic-speaking Jordanians in Canada

Jordan Journal of Modern Languages and Literatures, 2021

Language contact leads to a number of linguistic phenomena, most noticeably code-switching, which... more Language contact leads to a number of linguistic phenomena, most noticeably code-switching, which refers to bilinguals’ utilization of two languages in the same conversation and even within a single utterance. This study investigates Arabic-English code-switching among Jordanian immigrants in Manitoba, Canada and presents a qualitative analysis of the socio-pragmatic functions this linguistic behavior serves. The participants were 11 (3 females and 8 males) Jordanian immigrants living in Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba. Two instruments were employed to elicit the data necessary for this study: audio recordings and semi-structured interviews. The code-switching occurrences were categorized into different socio-pragmatic functions based on the analysis of the content of almost 18 hours of recorded conversations. The analysis of the content of the audio-recordings besides the semi-structured interviews showed that Jordanian immigrants resort to code-switching to achieve a number of s...

Pseudo Wh-Fronting: A Diagnosis of Wh-Constructions in Jordanian Arabic

University of Manitoba, 2016

This thesis provides an in-depth analysis of wh-question formation in Jordanian Arabic (JA) and p... more This thesis provides an in-depth analysis of wh-question formation in Jordanian Arabic (JA) and presents a uniform approach that can accommodate all of its various wh-constructions. JA makes use of five different wh-constructions, four of which involve clause-initial whphrases and the fifth is a typical in-situ wh-construction. Although wh-phrases surface clauseinitially in four different wh-constructions in JA, I propose that bona fide wh-movement to [Spec, CP] does not occur in any of these constructions, whether overtly in syntax or covertly at LF. I abandon the classification of JA as a wh-movement language (Abdel Razaq 2011) and focus instead on identifying the syntactic role that wh-phrases realize and the underlying structures that feed each wh-construction. I propose that the clause-initial position of the whphrase results either from the syntactic function that the wh-phrase serves or from other syntactic operations that are independently attested in JA. There are three clause-initial positions that the wh-phrase can occupy: it surfaces in [Spec, TP] when functioning as the subject of a verbal or verbless structure, in [Spec, TopP] when functioning as a clitic-leftdislocated element (as in CLLD questions and ʔilli-interrogatives involving PRON), or in [Spec, FocP] when undergoing focus fronting. Thus, all instances of clause-initial wh-phrases in JA constitute what I refer to as-pseudo wh-fronting‖, as the clause-initial position of the wh-phrase arises from mechanisms other than canonical wh-movement to [Spec, CP]. To account for the interpretation of wh-phrases in JA, I adopt a binding approach in which a null interrogative morpheme (Baker 1970; Pesetsky 1987; Chomsky 1995) unselectively binds the wh-phrase regardless of its surface position, whether clause-initial or clause-internal (in-situ). A major implication of this analysis is that JA is a concealed wh-in-situ language of the Chinese type although it looks at a cursory glance as though it were a wh-movement language of the English type. A broader typological implication of my analysis is the convergence of Cheng's (1991) Clausal Typing Hypothesis to which JA previously appeared to constitute a counterexample. The recognition of the null interrogative particle, or its optional overt realization as the Q-particle huwweh, as the locus of interrogative clause typing in all JA wh-questions entails that JA employs just one unique strategy to type a clause as a wh-question, as predicted by Cheng's Clausal Typing Hypothesis, regardless of whether the wh-phrase surfaces clause-initially or clause-internally.

The Instrumentality of Integrativeness: A Case Study of ESL  Saudi Students in Canada

Jordan Journal of Modern Languages and Literatures, 2020

This study looks into the orientations and attitudes of ESL Saudi students enrolled in the Intens... more This study looks into the orientations and attitudes of ESL Saudi students enrolled in the Intensive English Program (IEP) at the University of Manitoba (U of M), Canada. Little research has tackled the orientations and attitudes of Arab ESL students in a native-speaking context. The researchers expect that living in the native social, cultural context of Canada will create more positive attitudes towards Canadians, their culture and society, as well as higher integrative orientation on part of Saudi students. The subjects of this study were 17 Saudi students (11 males and 6 females). An attitudinal questionnaire was used to elicit the participants' attitudes towards Canadians and the Canadian culture as well as the participants' motivation for learning ESL. The data analysis revealed strong favorable attitudes towards Canadians as well as towards their culture. This positiveness was attributed to the native environment in which the learning process is taking place. Moreover, Saudi students exhibited a combination of both integrative and instrumental motivation to learn the target language.

Code-Switching to English amongst Arabic-speaking Jordanians in Canada

Jordan Journal of Modern Languages and Literatures, 2021

Language contact leads to a number of linguistic phenomena, most noticeably code-switching, which... more Language contact leads to a number of linguistic phenomena, most noticeably code-switching, which refers to bilinguals' utilization of two languages in the same conversation and even within a single utterance. This study investigates Arabic-English code-switching among Jordanian immigrants in Manitoba, Canada and presents a qualitative analysis of the socio-pragmatic functions this linguistic behavior serves. The participants were 11 (3 females and 8 males) Jordanian immigrants living in Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba. Two instruments were employed to elicit the data necessary for this study: audio recordings and semi-structured interviews. The code-switching occurrences were categorized into different socio-pragmatic functions based on the analysis of the content of almost 18 hours of recorded conversations. The analysis of the content of the audio-recordings besides the semi-structured interviews showed that Jordanian immigrants resort to code-switching to achieve a number of sociopragmatic functions: filling lexical needs, integrating into the Canadian culture and lifestyle, qualifying a message, mitigating embarrassment and negative connotations, quoting the exact words of somebody, and creating humorous or ironic effect.

Morphology of COVID-19 Neologisms in Modern Standard Arabic

Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2022

This study investigates the morphological behavior of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in terms of de... more This study investigates the morphological behavior of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in terms of developing neologisms related to the new requirements imposed by the outbreak of COVID-19. The data of the study was collected from the news reports of Al-Mamlakah TV, as being the most viewed channel in Jordan during the COVID-19 crisis. The findings of the study revealed that a majority of the collected neologisms were nouns, which provided further support to the theory of onomasiology (Štekauer, 1998). Compounding, borrowing (loan-translation, Arabicization, and hybridization), and semantic extension formed the major word-formation processes for creating such neologisms. Compounds fell into three categories depending on their internal structures N+Adj, N+N, and more elaborate complex compounds. The first two types were discussed in terms of their headedness and internal syntactic structure with a special reference to the cross-linguistic criteria that were used to identify such compound constructs, whereas the analysis advanced for the third type was inspired by Carstairs-McCarthy (2017). The data analysis revealed interesting aspects in the morphology of COVID-19 neologisms, most noticeably, the higher productivity of (N+N) compounds than (N+Adj) compounds, which goes against the putative assumption that the latter is much commoner in Arabic, identifying new compound types in MSA, namely, N+A metaphoric compounds and N+N hybridized compounds, and the possibility of having newly created three-member complex compounds (i.e., compounds within compounds). © 2022 EJAL & the Authors.

Congratulation Strategies by Jordanians on a Royal Birthday Facebook Status

Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 2022

The current paper investigates the congratulation speech act among Jordanian Facebook users in te... more The current paper investigates the congratulation speech act among Jordanian Facebook users in terms of patterns and linguistic forms with reference to the congratulation strategies adopted in response to a birthday Facebook status posted on the occasion of the 60 th birthday of His Majesty King Abdullah II Ibn Al-Hussein. The types of positive politeness strategies attested in these congratulatory forms are also tackled in this study. The comments posted by Jordanian Facebook users on this occasion formed the data necessary for the purpose of this study. The data analysis revealed that the dominant congratulation strategy among Jordanian Facebookers is Illocutionary force indicating device, and the use of proverbs and sayings is the least used strategy. As for the strategies of politeness in the congratulatory forms among Jordanian Facebook users, the data analysis revealed that the dominant strategies are giving gifts to the listener and in-group identity marker (usage of address forms); exaggerate and seek agreement (safe topic) strategies are the least used ones. These results were discussed in light of the theory of speech act (Austin, 1962) and the theory of politeness (Brown & Levinson, 1987). The religious beliefs, cultural values, and social norms of the Facebook users appeared to be influential with respect to these politeness and congratulation strategies. The study also touches upon several aspects related to the pragmatic competence of Jordanian Facebook users.

COVID-19 Humor on Jordanian Social Media: A Diagnosis of Written Jokes on Facebook

by Zeyad Al-Daher and Othman A-Dala'Ien

Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2022

This study investigates COVID-19 jokes created and circulated on Jordanian social media during th... more This study investigates COVID-19 jokes created and circulated on Jordanian social media during the period between March to October 2020. The jokes used in this study were collected from several Facebook accounts. The study presents a content analysis and a linguistic analysis of 197 COVID-19 jokes in terms of the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) (Attardo, 1994, 2001; Attardo & Raskin, 1991) with the goal of uncovering the thematic and structural aspects of these jokes. A mixed quantitative and qualitative approach was adopted for the data analysis. The jokes were categorized into eight major groups and subgroups depending on the themes they target. Various topics featured in these jokes: ethnic jokes, government decisions, effects of restrictions, sexist jokes, the virus, miscellaneous offensive jokes, the year 2020, and remote education. The linguistic analysis of the jokes revealed that they obey the six Knowledge Resources of the GTVH. Moreover, it was found that lexical relations (I.e., synonymy, antonymy, Homophony) as well as wordplay (i.e., pun, metaphor, prosody) are crucial strategies in forming such jokes. This paper contributes to the literature on dark or disaster humor and furthers our understanding of jocular discourse during global crises.

An Analysis of Compliment Response Strategies by Jordanian Adolescent Students: The Influence of Gender and Social Power

Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2022

This study highlights the compliment response strategies of Jordanian adolescent students, and di... more This study highlights the compliment response strategies of Jordanian adolescent students, and discusses the respective influences of gender and social power on the production of these strategies. The participants were 37 male and 37 female Jordanian adolescent students at private secondary schools in Amman, with ages ranging from 14–16. They responded to eight discourse completion test situations translated into Arabic to ensure the participants’ understanding. These eight scenarios resembled academic situations which students might face in their daily life, and were intended to represent interactions with persons of different social standing/power. The resulting data were analysed based on the classification system found in previous research. The results revealed that both male and female participants preferred to accept compliments over using non-acceptance strategies. The most frequent strategies used by both groups were combination strategies and acceptance strategies, while no...

The Impact of Learning Foreign Languages on the Psychology of Students at Yarmouk University