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The Dative Alternation in Lebanese Arabic: Preliminary Findings

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The Dative Alternation in Lebanese Arabic: Preliminary Findings Universiteit Gent Master of Arts in Advanced Studies in Linguistics Academiejaar 2014-2015 The dative alternation in Lebanese Arabic: preliminary findings Promotor: Prof. Dr. Klaas Willems Co-promotor : Ludovic De Cuypere Masterproef voorgelegd voor het behalen van de graad van Master of Arts in Advanced Studies in Linguistics: Linguistics in a Comparative Perspective door Thomas Schorreel 2 Acknowledgments First of all I would like to thank my promoter Klaas Willems and my co-promoter Ludovic De Cuypere for guiding me during my research. I would also like to acknowledge professor David Wilmsen from the American University of Beirut for helping me with organizing my field work in Lebanon. I am grateful to Helge Daniëls who provided me with a number of important bibliographical references. Another very big thank goes out to all of my interviewees in Lebanon, without whom I could not have completed this research. Last but not least, I want to thank my partner Laurens Bielen and all of my friends and family for supporting me during the hectic times of writing this dissertation. 3 Transcription used in this dissertation The system of transcription used in this dissertation is based on what is called the Arabic chat alphabet, where Latin script is used in combination with numbers to write vernacular Arabic. This system of transcribing Arabic into Latin script is mostly used by young people in the Middle East when communicating on the internet, but it has also become quite popular in textbooks of colloquial forms of Arabic. No distinction in writing is made between short and long vowels because this study is not concerned with matters of phonology. The following table shows where letters are not pronounced as in English, together with the Arabic letter they represent and their IPA symbols: Arabic letter Chat alphabet equivalent IPA ʔ ' ق or ء or ا ħ 7 ح sh ʃ ش D dˤ ض T tˤ ط ʕ 3 ع gh ɣ غ kh x خ j ʒ ج S sˤ ص 4 Contents Page 1. Introduction. 7 2. Introduction to the dative alternation. 9 3. Lebanese Arabic. 12 3.1 Lebanese Arabic: a historical perspective. 12 3.2 Language attitudes in Lebanon. 13 4. Review of the literature on dative alternation in Arabic. 15 4.1 Literature on the dative alternation in MSA. 16 4.2 Literature on the dative alternation in vernacular Arabic. 17 5 Previous research. 24 6. Methodology . 26 7. The dative alternation in Lebanese Arabic. 30 7.1 Summary of what has been written on Lebanese dative alternation so far . 30 7.2 Explanation of the different constructions in Lebanese. 31 7.3 What verbs show alternation? . 34 7.4 A tentative classification of the Lebanese Arabic dative verbs. 37 7.5 Distribution of the inversion in constructions 2, 3 and 4. 37 7.6 Causatives and verbs from MSA . 39 7.7 Comparison with other Arabic vernaculars. 40 7.7.1 Comparison with Egyptian Cairene and Hijazi Arabic and Maltese. 40 7.7.2 Comparison with Moroccan Arabic. 43 7.7.3 Conclusion. 44 8. Conclusion. 45 9. Bibliography. 48 5 Appendix: transcriptions of the interviews 51 1. Chrys Lama 51 2. Cynthia Abu Hassan 55 3. Maher Safar 60 4. Tania Jarmakaneh 64 5. Ghinwa Haddad 67 6. Jad Fadil 70 7. Araz Kojayan 74 8. Micheline Ziadee 77 9. Brahim Abdelghani 80 10. Jean-Pierre Danha 83 11. Hadi Aridi 86 12.Sara Alchaalan 89 13. Siham Hage Ali 92 14. Marwan Fakhr 95 15. Elsa Riachi 98 16. Romy Lynn Attieh 101 17. Yara Beaini 104 18. Rami Antoun 107 19. Talal Naboulsi 110 20. Muhammad Chbaro 113 21. Tareq Jebran 116 22. Bachir Fakih 119 23. Shereen Habbal 122 24. Woody Hojeile 125 25. Rifaat Faqih 128 26. Ibrahim Alkasdi 131 27. Linda Abbiasi 134 28. Cara Murani 137 29. Hussein Zahi Ramadan 140 30. Alhan Wahab 143 6 1 Introduction The subject of this dissertation is the “dative alternation” in Lebanese Arabic, and it is the first of its kind. In this study we will give a descriptive overview of the different constructions in which ditransitive verbs occur in the Lebanese vernacular and we will present a statistical analysis of their occurrence. We will also try to group the verbs according to the scientific literature. Because of the fact that this is one of the first studies on this topic in Lebanese Arabic and because of the limited scope, we can only present some preliminary remarks as is suggested by the title of this dissertation. The primary research aim is to describe how different ditransitive constructions are formed in Lebanese Arabic, and in particular how different constructions alternate with different verbs. Our aim is to distinguish relevant verb classes and to describe the distribution of the alternating constructions. A secondary aim is to briefly clarify the role of certain factors that according to the literature on the dative alternation (e.g., Bresnan & Nikitina 2003) might influence the speaker’s choice of a specific construction, in particular the factors definiteness, pronominality and causativity. We will, however, not make definitive claims on this subject, the purpose is rather to supplement the descriptive research of the data and provide an avenue for future research. The study is organized as follows. Chapter 2 is a short overview of the most important theoretical articles on the dative alternation in order to illustrate the different approaches to the subject that scholars have presented over the years. In this part we will introduce the terminology that will be used in this dissertation and we will make some remarks on the restrictions that govern the different dative constructions. Chapter 3 is dedicated to Lebanese Arabic. We will start off by giving an overview of what we define as Lebanese Arabic and how the contemporary Arabic vernaculars evolved from Classical Arabic, which will be illustrated with some of their characteristics. The next part of this chapter is about language attitudes in Lebanon. Here we explain the situation of multilingualism and multiglossia in the Middle East, and how the fact that Lebanese is understood across the Arab world influences the dialect itself. In Chapter 4 we review the existing scientific literature on the dative alternation in Arabic. In this context the term “dative” is used to refer to a thematic role, not a morphological case. The first part of the chapter reviews the literature on Modern Standard Arabic (from now on abbreviated as MSA), which is the written variant of the Arabic language. Here we discuss how the methodology of a lot of linguistic research on Arabic has not been up to standard and we also give an overview of how the dative alternation works in MSA. The next part of this chapter deals with the literature on the dative alternation in vernacular varieties of Arabic, and we will see that there is not a lot to be found. Some of the major publications by D. Wilmsen present us with a first account of how the dative alternation is encountered in Eastern dialects of Arabic. We also discuss Abu- 7 Haidar’s work on the Lebanese dialect of Baskinta where a good first overview of the dative alternation is provided. We will supplement this material with Bossong’s theory of differential object marking (henceforth abbreviated as DOM) and other specific accounts of Lebanese dialects. Chapter 5 reviews the results of a pilot study by the author on the subject of the dative alternation in Lebanese. This study was executed in order to delineate the research questions for this dissertation, by studying material from a film and several episodes of a TV-series in Lebanese Arabic. The pilot study shows how rich the variety of dative constructions in Lebanese Arabic is. In Chapter 6 we presents the methodology used in this dissertation. We explain why this subject was chosen and how the method of using questionnaires was adopted, together with how the speakers were selected. In the chapter we also discuss how the verbs and the different parameters that are included in the questionnaires were chosen. Finally, Chapter 7 is a presentation of all the findings from the analysis of the corpus of interviews regarding the dative alternation in Lebanese Arabic. We first summarize what we have seen so far from reviewing the scientific literature on this topic, having a look at the possible constructions for full noun phrases (from here on abbreviated as NPs) and for pronominal arguments. We then present the different possibilities that were encountered to express ditransitive constructions in our corpus, and we will analyze them. We proceed by clarifying the distribution of these constructions with tables and we present a tentative division of the verbs into alternating and non-alternating groups. After this we review our categorizations and discuss them from the point of view of some the theoretical articles that were discussed before. The next part is an analysis of what factors could have an influence on the constructions that have both the recipient-theme and the theme-recipient orders. Subsequently we briefly discuss the distribution of the different constructions with causative verbs and with loan verbs from MSA. We conclude the chapter by comparing our findings with two other articles on the dative alternation in different Arabic vernaculars, discussing Cairene Egyptian Arabic, Hijazi Arabic, Maltese and Moroccan Arabic. The appendix contains the transcriptions of the 30 interviews that make up the corpus for this study. 8 2 An introduction to the dative alternation In this chapter we will give a short overview of some important theoretical articles on ditransitive constructions and the dative alternation in the scientific literature.
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