In this paper I consider the vowel combinations of Classical Arabic. I discuss the possibiIity th... more In this paper I consider the vowel combinations of Classical Arabic. I discuss the possibiIity that vowel combinations which are not considered to have been standardly permitted in Classical Arabic might have occurred in certain ancient dialects. I draw mainly on the observations of Sibawayh, as well as more modem interpretors of the classical Arabic grammarians such as Rabill (1951) and al-Nassir (1993). Given the nature of the material which I am looking at and the relative brevity of this paper, the arguments which I present here are not intended to be anything more than speculative and exploratory.
This paper argues that the abstract levels which are typically recognised in linguistics – whethe... more This paper argues that the abstract levels which are typically recognised in linguistics – whether within phonology (e.g. the levels of distinctive features, phonemics/phonematics, and phonotactics), grammar (e.g. morphology and syntax), or ‘abstract semantics’ – are unnecessary. Although such levels correspond to an intuitively plausible model of natural languages, even natural languages are not fully constructed in the way these levels suggest, while other semiotic systems may be organisationally extremely different from the situation implied by these levels. In order to provide elegant (simple) and intuitively reasonable accounts of the relevant facts of language linguistic theories need to be significantly modified. ‘Translating’ into the specific technical terms of extended axiomatic functionnalism, the theory which is the focus of this paper, this means that the levels of ontidics (cenidics/phonidics, logidics/lexidics, delidics), ontematics (cenematics/phonematics, logematics...
This article deals with Central Urban Sudanese Arabic, or ‘Sudanese Arabic’ for short—by which I ... more This article deals with Central Urban Sudanese Arabic, or ‘Sudanese Arabic’ for short—by which I mean, more specifically, the urban dialect spoken in Greater Khartoum (Khartoum, Khartoum North and Omdurman), and in other urban areas of central Sudan, roughly to the towns of Atbara in the north, Sennar on the Blue Nile and Kosti on the White Nile.2,3 It considers the relationship between the definite particle al- (plus allomorphic variants), for example in al-bēt ‘the house’, and what I shall argue is zero (Ø) commuting with al- (amongst other things), for example in bēt ‘a house’, as contrasted with al-bēt ‘the house’.4 What I term here, the ‘definite particle’ is more traditionally termed the ‘definite article’. For reasons why ‘definite particle’ is to be preferred to ‘definite article’ in the description of Sudanese Arabic, see Dickins (2009b; and Section 4 below). Henceforth, I shall, for brevity, refer to the definite particle as al-. I consider (i) Ø and (ii) al- in relation t...
This article proposes an ontology (set of entities and explicit statement of the relations betwee... more This article proposes an ontology (set of entities and explicit statement of the relations between them) for word-sequences (whether continuous or discontinuous) whose unifying feature is the co-occurrence within them of one or more of their words at greater frequency than would be predicted by their overall frequency of occurrence within the language. More precisely, the article proposes a number of possible ontologies, since, for some entities, it presents alternative possible definitions, discussing their merits and demerits. The article focuses almost entirely on English. It begins with a statement of general methodological principles. It argues we should not be attempting to discover what the true meaning of terms is, but to produce ‘serviceable definitions’ of terms which are at least relatively compatible with those produced by other writers and which can be coherently and explicitly related to other terms within the ontology. What I mean by a ‘serviceable definition’ is one ...
This chapter operates with a basic distinction between denotative and connotative meaning. Denota... more This chapter operates with a basic distinction between denotative and connotative meaning. Denotative meaning involves the overall range, in a particular sense, of an expression – word, multi-word unit, or syntactic structure. A ‘syntactic structure’ is defined to include the words involved in that structure, not just the abstracted structural relations. Thus, in relation to a ‘parsetree’ approach, a syntactic structure under this definition goes beyond the nodes (terminal and non-terminal) to include the vocabulary items that are attached to terminal nodes. Two expressions in a particular sense that ‘pick out’ the same extensional range of entities in the world – or better, in all possible worlds, real and imaginable – have the same denotative meaning.
Text Analytics and Transcription Technology for Quranic Arabic, 2014
Natural Language Processing Working Together with Arabic and Islamic Studies is a 2-year project ... more Natural Language Processing Working Together with Arabic and Islamic Studies is a 2-year project funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to study prosodicsyntactic mark-up in the Quran (Atwell et al 2013). Tajwīd or correct Quranic recitation is very important in Islam. The original insight informing this project is to view tajwīd mark-up in the Quran as additional text-based data for computational analysis. This mark-up is already incorporated into Quranic Arabic script, and identifies phrase boundaries of different strengths, plus lengthene syllables denoting prosodically and semantically salient words. We have developed a graphemephoneme mapping scheme (Brierley et al 2014), plus state-of-the-art software(Sawalha et al 2014) for generating a stressed and syllabified phonemic transcription or citation form for each word in the entire text of the Quran, using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). This canonical pronunciation tier for Classic...
This paper shows that three kinds of phenomena typically subject to disparate analyses are all fo... more This paper shows that three kinds of phenomena typically subject to disparate analyses are all forms of 'associative meaning': (i) extralinguistic- based, (ii) linguistic-based, and (iii) scalar implicature-based. It argues that scalar implicature in particular may be of three types: hyponymous, quasi-hyponymous, and pseudo-hyponymous. The paper begins with a basic definition of denotative and connotative meaning, and within connotative meaning of associative mean- ing. A formal model is provided for utterance-meaning, based around the notions of referent and ascription. This allows for a detailed formal analysis of extralin- guistic- and linguistic-based associative meaning. The model is refined to ad- dress scalar implicature-based associative meaning, through a theory-based ac- count of the distinction between ambiguity and indeterminacy, allowing for a formal analysis of 'some' and cardinal numbers. I also briefly consider a fourth type of associative meaning - c...
Natural Language Processing Working Together with Arabic and Islamic Studies is a 2-year project ... more Natural Language Processing Working Together with Arabic and Islamic Studies is a 2-year project funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to study prosodicsyntactic mark-up in the Quran (Atwell et al 2013). Tajwīd or correct Quranic recitation is very important in Islam. The original insight informing this project is to view tajwīd mark-up in the Quran as additional text-based data for computational analysis. This mark-up is already incorporated into Quranic Arabic script, and identifies phrase boundaries of different strengths, plus lengthened syllables denoting prosodically and semantically salient words. We have developed a graphemephoneme mapping scheme (Brierley et al 2016), plus state-of-the-art software (Sawalha et al 2014) for generating a stressed and syllabified phonemic transcription or citation form for each word in the entire text of the Quran, using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). This canonical pronunciation tier for Class...
This paper describes an Arabic dialect identification system which we developed for the Discrimin... more This paper describes an Arabic dialect identification system which we developed for the Discriminating Similar Languages (DSL) 2016 shared task. We classified Arabic dialects by using Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA) data analytic tool which contains many alternative filters and classifiers for machine learning. We experimented with several classifiers and the best accuracy was achieved using the Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO) algorithm for training and testing process set to three different feature-sets for each testing process. Our approach achieved an accuracy equal to 42.85% which is considerably worse in comparison to the evaluation scores on the training set of 80-90% and with training set “60:40” percentage split which achieved accuracy around 50%. We observed that Buckwalter transcripts from the Saarland Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system are given without short vowels, though the Buckwalter system has notation for these. We elaborate such obse...
This paper presents two sets of lexical items automatically extracted from the Arabic Qur’ān, and... more This paper presents two sets of lexical items automatically extracted from the Arabic Qur’ān, and denoting two different notions of linguistic salience: keyness and prosodic prominence. Our novel hypothesis investigates a possible correlation between them. Our novel findings discover distributionally significant keywords that also occur strategically in phrase-final position so as to maximise their prominence, and thus meaningfulness, for reader, reciter, and aural recipient. Our methodology first computes Quranic keywords via the Corpus Linguistics technique of Keyword Extraction, and maps them to major Quranic themes in Islamic scholarship. Next, we implement a bespoke algorithm for rule-based capture of words annotated with madd or prolongation, a specific type of prosodic highlighting in Quranic recitation rules or tajwīd. We find it especially interesting that the concept of final syllable lengthening (madd before pause) is encoded in tajwīid and effectively demarcates phrase b...
This paper argues that the abstract levels which are typically recognised in linguistics -- wheth... more This paper argues that the abstract levels which are typically recognised in linguistics -- whether within phonology (e.g. the levels of distinctive features, phonemics/phonematics, and phonotactics), grammar (e.g. morphology and syntax), or 'abstract semantics' -- are unnecessary. Although such levels correspond to an intuitively plausible model of natural languages, even natural languages are not fully constructed in the way these levels suggest, while other semiotic systems may be organisationally extremely different from the situation implied by these levels. In order to provide elegant (simple) and intuitively reasonable accounts of the relevant facts of language linguistic theories need to be significantly modified. 'Translating' into the specific technical terms of extended axiomatic functionnalism, the theory which is the focus of this paper, this means that the levels of ontidics (cenidics/phonidics, logidics/lexidics, delidics), ontematics (cenematics/phone...
This paper develops a ‘signum ontology’, i.e. a model for coherently linking the signum (cf. sign... more This paper develops a ‘signum ontology’, i.e. a model for coherently linking the signum (cf. sign) as an abstract entity ultimately to speech phenomena. It begins by analysing basic aspects of language: physical, meaningful and ‘word’ (i.e. in terms of word-identity), abstract and concrete (sections 2-5, 7), within a semiotic framework (Section 6). The resulting relationships between phonological, grammatical and abstract semantic entities (Section 8) allow for the incorporation of allomorph and alloseme into the model (Section 9). Having established core features of the model, I go back to the periphery, showing how maximally primitive notions (unascribed phonetic image correlate, and unascribed semantic image correlate / referent) provide a basis for coherently linking language reality (speech phenomena) to the abstractions of the model (Section 10), via a small number of serially applied basic principles, crucial among which is a set-forming criterion (Section 11). I show how the...
In this paper I consider the vowel combinations of Classical Arabic. I discuss the possibiIity th... more In this paper I consider the vowel combinations of Classical Arabic. I discuss the possibiIity that vowel combinations which are not considered to have been standardly permitted in Classical Arabic might have occurred in certain ancient dialects. I draw mainly on the observations of Sibawayh, as well as more modem interpretors of the classical Arabic grammarians such as Rabill (1951) and al-Nassir (1993). Given the nature of the material which I am looking at and the relative brevity of this paper, the arguments which I present here are not intended to be anything more than speculative and exploratory.
This paper argues that the abstract levels which are typically recognised in linguistics – whethe... more This paper argues that the abstract levels which are typically recognised in linguistics – whether within phonology (e.g. the levels of distinctive features, phonemics/phonematics, and phonotactics), grammar (e.g. morphology and syntax), or ‘abstract semantics’ – are unnecessary. Although such levels correspond to an intuitively plausible model of natural languages, even natural languages are not fully constructed in the way these levels suggest, while other semiotic systems may be organisationally extremely different from the situation implied by these levels. In order to provide elegant (simple) and intuitively reasonable accounts of the relevant facts of language linguistic theories need to be significantly modified. ‘Translating’ into the specific technical terms of extended axiomatic functionnalism, the theory which is the focus of this paper, this means that the levels of ontidics (cenidics/phonidics, logidics/lexidics, delidics), ontematics (cenematics/phonematics, logematics...
This article deals with Central Urban Sudanese Arabic, or ‘Sudanese Arabic’ for short—by which I ... more This article deals with Central Urban Sudanese Arabic, or ‘Sudanese Arabic’ for short—by which I mean, more specifically, the urban dialect spoken in Greater Khartoum (Khartoum, Khartoum North and Omdurman), and in other urban areas of central Sudan, roughly to the towns of Atbara in the north, Sennar on the Blue Nile and Kosti on the White Nile.2,3 It considers the relationship between the definite particle al- (plus allomorphic variants), for example in al-bēt ‘the house’, and what I shall argue is zero (Ø) commuting with al- (amongst other things), for example in bēt ‘a house’, as contrasted with al-bēt ‘the house’.4 What I term here, the ‘definite particle’ is more traditionally termed the ‘definite article’. For reasons why ‘definite particle’ is to be preferred to ‘definite article’ in the description of Sudanese Arabic, see Dickins (2009b; and Section 4 below). Henceforth, I shall, for brevity, refer to the definite particle as al-. I consider (i) Ø and (ii) al- in relation t...
This article proposes an ontology (set of entities and explicit statement of the relations betwee... more This article proposes an ontology (set of entities and explicit statement of the relations between them) for word-sequences (whether continuous or discontinuous) whose unifying feature is the co-occurrence within them of one or more of their words at greater frequency than would be predicted by their overall frequency of occurrence within the language. More precisely, the article proposes a number of possible ontologies, since, for some entities, it presents alternative possible definitions, discussing their merits and demerits. The article focuses almost entirely on English. It begins with a statement of general methodological principles. It argues we should not be attempting to discover what the true meaning of terms is, but to produce ‘serviceable definitions’ of terms which are at least relatively compatible with those produced by other writers and which can be coherently and explicitly related to other terms within the ontology. What I mean by a ‘serviceable definition’ is one ...
This chapter operates with a basic distinction between denotative and connotative meaning. Denota... more This chapter operates with a basic distinction between denotative and connotative meaning. Denotative meaning involves the overall range, in a particular sense, of an expression – word, multi-word unit, or syntactic structure. A ‘syntactic structure’ is defined to include the words involved in that structure, not just the abstracted structural relations. Thus, in relation to a ‘parsetree’ approach, a syntactic structure under this definition goes beyond the nodes (terminal and non-terminal) to include the vocabulary items that are attached to terminal nodes. Two expressions in a particular sense that ‘pick out’ the same extensional range of entities in the world – or better, in all possible worlds, real and imaginable – have the same denotative meaning.
Text Analytics and Transcription Technology for Quranic Arabic, 2014
Natural Language Processing Working Together with Arabic and Islamic Studies is a 2-year project ... more Natural Language Processing Working Together with Arabic and Islamic Studies is a 2-year project funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to study prosodicsyntactic mark-up in the Quran (Atwell et al 2013). Tajwīd or correct Quranic recitation is very important in Islam. The original insight informing this project is to view tajwīd mark-up in the Quran as additional text-based data for computational analysis. This mark-up is already incorporated into Quranic Arabic script, and identifies phrase boundaries of different strengths, plus lengthene syllables denoting prosodically and semantically salient words. We have developed a graphemephoneme mapping scheme (Brierley et al 2014), plus state-of-the-art software(Sawalha et al 2014) for generating a stressed and syllabified phonemic transcription or citation form for each word in the entire text of the Quran, using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). This canonical pronunciation tier for Classic...
This paper shows that three kinds of phenomena typically subject to disparate analyses are all fo... more This paper shows that three kinds of phenomena typically subject to disparate analyses are all forms of 'associative meaning': (i) extralinguistic- based, (ii) linguistic-based, and (iii) scalar implicature-based. It argues that scalar implicature in particular may be of three types: hyponymous, quasi-hyponymous, and pseudo-hyponymous. The paper begins with a basic definition of denotative and connotative meaning, and within connotative meaning of associative mean- ing. A formal model is provided for utterance-meaning, based around the notions of referent and ascription. This allows for a detailed formal analysis of extralin- guistic- and linguistic-based associative meaning. The model is refined to ad- dress scalar implicature-based associative meaning, through a theory-based ac- count of the distinction between ambiguity and indeterminacy, allowing for a formal analysis of 'some' and cardinal numbers. I also briefly consider a fourth type of associative meaning - c...
Natural Language Processing Working Together with Arabic and Islamic Studies is a 2-year project ... more Natural Language Processing Working Together with Arabic and Islamic Studies is a 2-year project funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to study prosodicsyntactic mark-up in the Quran (Atwell et al 2013). Tajwīd or correct Quranic recitation is very important in Islam. The original insight informing this project is to view tajwīd mark-up in the Quran as additional text-based data for computational analysis. This mark-up is already incorporated into Quranic Arabic script, and identifies phrase boundaries of different strengths, plus lengthened syllables denoting prosodically and semantically salient words. We have developed a graphemephoneme mapping scheme (Brierley et al 2016), plus state-of-the-art software (Sawalha et al 2014) for generating a stressed and syllabified phonemic transcription or citation form for each word in the entire text of the Quran, using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). This canonical pronunciation tier for Class...
This paper describes an Arabic dialect identification system which we developed for the Discrimin... more This paper describes an Arabic dialect identification system which we developed for the Discriminating Similar Languages (DSL) 2016 shared task. We classified Arabic dialects by using Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA) data analytic tool which contains many alternative filters and classifiers for machine learning. We experimented with several classifiers and the best accuracy was achieved using the Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO) algorithm for training and testing process set to three different feature-sets for each testing process. Our approach achieved an accuracy equal to 42.85% which is considerably worse in comparison to the evaluation scores on the training set of 80-90% and with training set “60:40” percentage split which achieved accuracy around 50%. We observed that Buckwalter transcripts from the Saarland Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system are given without short vowels, though the Buckwalter system has notation for these. We elaborate such obse...
This paper presents two sets of lexical items automatically extracted from the Arabic Qur’ān, and... more This paper presents two sets of lexical items automatically extracted from the Arabic Qur’ān, and denoting two different notions of linguistic salience: keyness and prosodic prominence. Our novel hypothesis investigates a possible correlation between them. Our novel findings discover distributionally significant keywords that also occur strategically in phrase-final position so as to maximise their prominence, and thus meaningfulness, for reader, reciter, and aural recipient. Our methodology first computes Quranic keywords via the Corpus Linguistics technique of Keyword Extraction, and maps them to major Quranic themes in Islamic scholarship. Next, we implement a bespoke algorithm for rule-based capture of words annotated with madd or prolongation, a specific type of prosodic highlighting in Quranic recitation rules or tajwīd. We find it especially interesting that the concept of final syllable lengthening (madd before pause) is encoded in tajwīid and effectively demarcates phrase b...
This paper argues that the abstract levels which are typically recognised in linguistics -- wheth... more This paper argues that the abstract levels which are typically recognised in linguistics -- whether within phonology (e.g. the levels of distinctive features, phonemics/phonematics, and phonotactics), grammar (e.g. morphology and syntax), or 'abstract semantics' -- are unnecessary. Although such levels correspond to an intuitively plausible model of natural languages, even natural languages are not fully constructed in the way these levels suggest, while other semiotic systems may be organisationally extremely different from the situation implied by these levels. In order to provide elegant (simple) and intuitively reasonable accounts of the relevant facts of language linguistic theories need to be significantly modified. 'Translating' into the specific technical terms of extended axiomatic functionnalism, the theory which is the focus of this paper, this means that the levels of ontidics (cenidics/phonidics, logidics/lexidics, delidics), ontematics (cenematics/phone...
This paper develops a ‘signum ontology’, i.e. a model for coherently linking the signum (cf. sign... more This paper develops a ‘signum ontology’, i.e. a model for coherently linking the signum (cf. sign) as an abstract entity ultimately to speech phenomena. It begins by analysing basic aspects of language: physical, meaningful and ‘word’ (i.e. in terms of word-identity), abstract and concrete (sections 2-5, 7), within a semiotic framework (Section 6). The resulting relationships between phonological, grammatical and abstract semantic entities (Section 8) allow for the incorporation of allomorph and alloseme into the model (Section 9). Having established core features of the model, I go back to the periphery, showing how maximally primitive notions (unascribed phonetic image correlate, and unascribed semantic image correlate / referent) provide a basis for coherently linking language reality (speech phenomena) to the abstractions of the model (Section 10), via a small number of serially applied basic principles, crucial among which is a set-forming criterion (Section 11). I show how the...
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Papers by James Dickins