International Journal of English Linguistics, 2021
Learning to produce and to identify sounds (phonemes) is not the same as learning the difference ... more Learning to produce and to identify sounds (phonemes) is not the same as learning the difference between sounds which leads to meaning delivery. One part of the acquisition of phonetics is the ability to perceive sounds which distinguish differences in meaning. This paper explores the perception in Saudi learners of the English Bilabial Stops /p/ and /b/ and the English Labio-dental Fricatives /f/ and /v/. Four different groups took part in this experiment. These groups were divided according to their age and their exposure to English either in English speaking countries or elsewhere. The participants had to listen to the different phonemes occurring initially, medially and finally. One of these groups of words contained non-sense words to test the participants’ mis-perceptions when they do not recognize the sounds as part of their mental lexical knowledge. The results show these four groups faced difficulties perceiving and recognizing some sounds according to their exposure to Eng...
Krauss, among others, claims that languages will face death in the coming centuries (Krauss, 1992... more Krauss, among others, claims that languages will face death in the coming centuries (Krauss, 1992). Austin (2010a) lists 7,000 languages as existing and spoken in the world today. Krauss estimates that this figure could come down to 600. That is, most the world’s languages are endangered. Therefore, an endangered language is a language that loses her speakers within a few generations. According to Dorian (1981), there is what is called “tip†in language endangerment. He argues that a language’s decline can start slowly but suddenly goes through a rapid decline towards the extinction. Thus, languages must be protected at much earlier stage. Arabic dialects such as Zahrani Spoken Arabic (ZSA), and Faifi Spoken Arabic (henceforth, FSA), which are spoken in the southern region of Saudi Arabia, have not been studied, yet. Few people speak these dialects, among many other dialects in the same region. However, the problem is that most these dialects’ native speakers are moving to ...
Gender assignment has been studied in many languages and the assignment system is considered impo... more Gender assignment has been studied in many languages and the assignment system is considered important particularly when it is related to determining the structure of the lexicon. Semitic languages show two genders, namely masculine and feminine. Nevertheless, it has been claimed that some nouns in Semitic languages can have common gender. Some linguists suggest number of criteria based on the classifications for number and gender in Semitic languages: masculine/feminine, animate/inanimate, human/non-human, individual/collective, concrete/abstract, singular/plural, and major/minor. Arabic, like other Semitic languages, determines gender of its nouns either through meaning or through form. So, grammatical gender is a way of analyzing nouns classes with relation to semantic features, like masculine, feminine, animacy, etc. It is a property of individual nouns regardless of their existing referents (if there are). There have been efforts by many researchers, trying to explain the processing of gender in comprehension. This paper discusses how gender is assigned to nouns in Saudi dialects where a supervised machine learning algorithm is used to test the predictiveness of gender in Arabic. The data show interestingly that the presence of some semantic and morphological features helps to predict the gender of nouns. It is not fully predictable but it is the start point for further investigations.
This paper discusses the agreement system in one of the most distinguished Saudi dialects. Qassim... more This paper discusses the agreement system in one of the most distinguished Saudi dialects. Qassimi Spoken Arabic is a dialect, which is spoken by around 931,085 people living mainly in Al-Qassim Province, which is located in the center of Saudi Arabia. Prochazka (1988) claims that QSA has many noticeable and distinguishable features make the dialect different from other Najdi dialects. QSA is different from MSA in its phonological, morphological, syntactic levels. QSA does not accept all word orders, which are present in either MSA or other Saudi dialects. They prefer VS order. However, they use the SV order when they have SVO structure due to the absence of case marking which might lead to ambiguity determining the subject and/or the object. QSA shows that the subject controls the agreement system in both the verbal clauses and in the equational clauses. QSA also shows to produce a different form of the passive verb like ʔkissarat: "is broken", which is a form that is not seen to be used except in QSA. It has two different subject agreement markers suffixes: /-tin/ (second person non-singular feminine) and /-n/ (third person nonsingular feminine) as in katab-tin: "You (2PF) wrote" and katab-n: "They (3PF) wrote". Native speakers of QSA use the direct object /-an/ or /-atan/ as a masculine or feminine pronoun respectively to replace masculine or feminine noun. Interestingly, QSA uses /-an/ with the copula verb ka:n: "be" as an agreement to the feminine subject. Thus, QSA shows to have some differences in the agreement system in the sentence level.
NOTION: Journal of Linguistics, Literature, and Culture
Negation in languages is a phenomenon, which receives researchers' attention for a long perio... more Negation in languages is a phenomenon, which receives researchers' attention for a long period. Negation occurs on different type of clauses by which it shows to have morphological and syntactic changes over the structure of words, phrases and sentences. Verbs of imminenceare used sometimes to denote negation in verbal clauses in Arabic. ka:d is one of those verbs which carries the negation of the clause without using any negative particles. Saudi dialects use the verb baʁa to perform the same function. This paper discusses baʁa in verbal clauses illustrating its syntactic and semantic impact on the structure of the clauses. It requires the imperfective form of the verb to follow. Negating a clause, with the only negative particles ma: and/or la:, does not carry the negative sense because it is delivered through the use of baʁa. Thus, the negation of verbs of imminence does not require the presence of any negative particles. Otherwise, the positive meaning is delivered.
Als2011 Australian Linguistics Society Annual Conference Conference Proceedings, Jul 26, 2011
Languages use different means to mark sentence negation. Some languages such as Standard French (... more Languages use different means to mark sentence negation. Some languages such as Standard French (Pollock 1989, cited in Ouhalla 2002) and West Flemish (Haegeman 1995, cited in Ouhalla 2002) mark negation on sentences using two elements. Others like Italian (Belletti 1990, cited in Ouhalla 2002) and English mark it only with one element. Arabic dialects have both types of variation Ouhalla (1993:299). Faify Arabic (henceforth FA), as one of the endangered languages in Saudi Arabia, uses a very simple way to express negation. It is easily accomplished by the use of maa where this negative particle does not have any morphological effect on the following word and/or phrase. I suggest that this dialect has almost lost all the eight negative particles which exist in Arabic. I suggest that maa can be used to negate different types of clauses in FA. In verbal clauses, it occurs before both the perfective and imperfective forms of verbs. Moreover, in nominal clauses, it occurs before the subject to negate the whole clause or it occurs before the predicate to negate it as a partial negation of the clause.
International Journal of English Linguistics, 2021
Learning to produce and to identify sounds (phonemes) is not the same as learning the difference ... more Learning to produce and to identify sounds (phonemes) is not the same as learning the difference between sounds which leads to meaning delivery. One part of the acquisition of phonetics is the ability to perceive sounds which distinguish differences in meaning. This paper explores the perception in Saudi learners of the English Bilabial Stops /p/ and /b/ and the English Labio-dental Fricatives /f/ and /v/. Four different groups took part in this experiment. These groups were divided according to their age and their exposure to English either in English speaking countries or elsewhere. The participants had to listen to the different phonemes occurring initially, medially and finally. One of these groups of words contained non-sense words to test the participants’ mis-perceptions when they do not recognize the sounds as part of their mental lexical knowledge. The results show these four groups faced difficulties perceiving and recognizing some sounds according to their exposure to Eng...
Krauss, among others, claims that languages will face death in the coming centuries (Krauss, 1992... more Krauss, among others, claims that languages will face death in the coming centuries (Krauss, 1992). Austin (2010a) lists 7,000 languages as existing and spoken in the world today. Krauss estimates that this figure could come down to 600. That is, most the world’s languages are endangered. Therefore, an endangered language is a language that loses her speakers within a few generations. According to Dorian (1981), there is what is called “tip†in language endangerment. He argues that a language’s decline can start slowly but suddenly goes through a rapid decline towards the extinction. Thus, languages must be protected at much earlier stage. Arabic dialects such as Zahrani Spoken Arabic (ZSA), and Faifi Spoken Arabic (henceforth, FSA), which are spoken in the southern region of Saudi Arabia, have not been studied, yet. Few people speak these dialects, among many other dialects in the same region. However, the problem is that most these dialects’ native speakers are moving to ...
Gender assignment has been studied in many languages and the assignment system is considered impo... more Gender assignment has been studied in many languages and the assignment system is considered important particularly when it is related to determining the structure of the lexicon. Semitic languages show two genders, namely masculine and feminine. Nevertheless, it has been claimed that some nouns in Semitic languages can have common gender. Some linguists suggest number of criteria based on the classifications for number and gender in Semitic languages: masculine/feminine, animate/inanimate, human/non-human, individual/collective, concrete/abstract, singular/plural, and major/minor. Arabic, like other Semitic languages, determines gender of its nouns either through meaning or through form. So, grammatical gender is a way of analyzing nouns classes with relation to semantic features, like masculine, feminine, animacy, etc. It is a property of individual nouns regardless of their existing referents (if there are). There have been efforts by many researchers, trying to explain the processing of gender in comprehension. This paper discusses how gender is assigned to nouns in Saudi dialects where a supervised machine learning algorithm is used to test the predictiveness of gender in Arabic. The data show interestingly that the presence of some semantic and morphological features helps to predict the gender of nouns. It is not fully predictable but it is the start point for further investigations.
This paper discusses the agreement system in one of the most distinguished Saudi dialects. Qassim... more This paper discusses the agreement system in one of the most distinguished Saudi dialects. Qassimi Spoken Arabic is a dialect, which is spoken by around 931,085 people living mainly in Al-Qassim Province, which is located in the center of Saudi Arabia. Prochazka (1988) claims that QSA has many noticeable and distinguishable features make the dialect different from other Najdi dialects. QSA is different from MSA in its phonological, morphological, syntactic levels. QSA does not accept all word orders, which are present in either MSA or other Saudi dialects. They prefer VS order. However, they use the SV order when they have SVO structure due to the absence of case marking which might lead to ambiguity determining the subject and/or the object. QSA shows that the subject controls the agreement system in both the verbal clauses and in the equational clauses. QSA also shows to produce a different form of the passive verb like ʔkissarat: "is broken", which is a form that is not seen to be used except in QSA. It has two different subject agreement markers suffixes: /-tin/ (second person non-singular feminine) and /-n/ (third person nonsingular feminine) as in katab-tin: "You (2PF) wrote" and katab-n: "They (3PF) wrote". Native speakers of QSA use the direct object /-an/ or /-atan/ as a masculine or feminine pronoun respectively to replace masculine or feminine noun. Interestingly, QSA uses /-an/ with the copula verb ka:n: "be" as an agreement to the feminine subject. Thus, QSA shows to have some differences in the agreement system in the sentence level.
NOTION: Journal of Linguistics, Literature, and Culture
Negation in languages is a phenomenon, which receives researchers' attention for a long perio... more Negation in languages is a phenomenon, which receives researchers' attention for a long period. Negation occurs on different type of clauses by which it shows to have morphological and syntactic changes over the structure of words, phrases and sentences. Verbs of imminenceare used sometimes to denote negation in verbal clauses in Arabic. ka:d is one of those verbs which carries the negation of the clause without using any negative particles. Saudi dialects use the verb baʁa to perform the same function. This paper discusses baʁa in verbal clauses illustrating its syntactic and semantic impact on the structure of the clauses. It requires the imperfective form of the verb to follow. Negating a clause, with the only negative particles ma: and/or la:, does not carry the negative sense because it is delivered through the use of baʁa. Thus, the negation of verbs of imminence does not require the presence of any negative particles. Otherwise, the positive meaning is delivered.
Als2011 Australian Linguistics Society Annual Conference Conference Proceedings, Jul 26, 2011
Languages use different means to mark sentence negation. Some languages such as Standard French (... more Languages use different means to mark sentence negation. Some languages such as Standard French (Pollock 1989, cited in Ouhalla 2002) and West Flemish (Haegeman 1995, cited in Ouhalla 2002) mark negation on sentences using two elements. Others like Italian (Belletti 1990, cited in Ouhalla 2002) and English mark it only with one element. Arabic dialects have both types of variation Ouhalla (1993:299). Faify Arabic (henceforth FA), as one of the endangered languages in Saudi Arabia, uses a very simple way to express negation. It is easily accomplished by the use of maa where this negative particle does not have any morphological effect on the following word and/or phrase. I suggest that this dialect has almost lost all the eight negative particles which exist in Arabic. I suggest that maa can be used to negate different types of clauses in FA. In verbal clauses, it occurs before both the perfective and imperfective forms of verbs. Moreover, in nominal clauses, it occurs before the subject to negate the whole clause or it occurs before the predicate to negate it as a partial negation of the clause.
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