Arabs Vs. Arab Americans by Fatima Ahmad
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A Thesis Entitled Deictic Reference: Arabs vs. Arab Americans By Fatima Ahmad Esseili Submitted as partial fulfillment for the requirement for The Masters of Arts in English with a Concentration in ESL ___________________________ Advisor: Dr. Douglas Coleman ___________________________ Dr. Samir Abu-Absi __________________________ Dr. Melinda Reichelt __________________________ Graduate School The University of Toledo May 2006 An Abstract of Deictic Reference: Arabs vs. Arab Americans By Fatima Ahmad Esseili Submitted as partial fulfillment for the requirement for The Masters of Arts The University of Toledo May 2006 This study compares the verbal and nonverbal behavior of 33 Arabs and 20 Arab Americans. The study compares the Arabs’ use of hada ‘this’ and hadak ‘that’ against the Arab Americans’. Definitions of these deictic terms provided by grammar books and dictionaries are also examined in this study. The subjects were prompted to refer to objects as the ones that they liked the best and least, from three distinct groups of objects: different objects; same objects, different color; and identical objects. The subjects’ verbal responses along with their nonverbal gestures were recorded. The study suggests, based on Lambda tests of correlation, that the verbal and non-verbal behavior of Arabs is different from that of Arab Americans. It also suggests that the traditional definitions and theoretical explanations of hada ‘this’ and hadak ‘that’ are not real world properties of the native speakers and have no existence in actual communication. ii Acknowledgments I would like to thank my outstanding mother for her love and support, and my father for instilling in me the love for freedom, beauty, and creativity. أ>DE= وآAB@ و?<= و>;:6 و678ر : HُJKِ;M آ7G@! >Rك و?JV : O:P@ا BSBT دآW ود?:WJ ا6TاWX.. I would like to thank my advisor Dr. Douglas Coleman for his patience and for always encouraging us to think outside the box. Special thanks to my supervisor Dr. Samir Abu-Absi for being a great mentor and for being a father to me in Toledo. Dr. Melinda Reichelt: many thanks for your insightful guidance. I would like to extend my thanks and gratitude to my extraordinary professors at the Lebanese University, Dr. Nahida Saad and Dr. Salah Eddine Hariri. I would also like to thank my exceptional friends in Lebanon: Nadera, Mona, Reem, Wissam, Rana, and Dima. Many thanks to the “You can do it group” at The University of Toledo: Amira, Adina, Adam, Alex, Anastasia, Beth, Cathy, Gaby, Hong, Hwan, Justin, Katherine, Rachel, Sarah & Nate, Veronica, Torey, Sue and Nancy. Finally, warm thanks go to =>? Thank you all for being in my life. iii Table of contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Table of Contents iv List of Figures v List of Tables vi Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2: Methodology – Background research 17 Chapter 3: Results 30 Chapter 4: Summary of Findings 37 References 39 iv List of Figures Figure 1 – Percentage of Arabs and Arab Americans 23 Figure 2 – Glass Animals 25 Figure 3 – Colored Jacks 25 Figure 4 – Identical Jacks 26 Figure 5 – Barrier between the subjects and the objects 27 Figure 6 – Subjects one meter away from objects 27 v List of Tables Table 1 – Proximal Demonstrative Pronouns in MSA 6 (adapted from Faris 1995, Ghrayyib 1983, and Tarhini 1996) Table 2 – Medial Demonstrative Pronouns in MSA 7 (adapted from Faris 1995, Ghrayyib 1983, and Tarhini 1996) Table 3 – Distal Demonstrative Pronouns in MSA 7 (adapted from Faris 1995, Ghrayyib 1983, and Tarhini 1996) Table 4 – (Brustad, 2000) 8 Table 5 – (Brustad, 2000) 8 Table 6 – Different Objects: verbal and nonverbal response 18 Table 7 – Different Color: verbal and nonverbal behavior 19 Table 8 – Identical objects: Verbal and non-behavior 20 Table 9 – Different Objects (Best): verbal responses of the two groups according to the position of objects. 31 Table 10 – Different Colors (best): verbal and nonverbal behavior 32 Table 11 – Identical objects: verbal responses of Arabs and Arab Americans 33 Table 12 – Identical Objects (best): verbal and nonverbal behavior. 34 Table 13– Arab American verbal response 35 vi Chapter One Introduction and Background As a result of the nineteenth century renaissance movement in the Arab world, calls for arabization, mainly through language, emerged with the problem of the diglossic nature of Arabic in the frontline (Abu-Absi, 1986). Classical Arabic was reformed and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) materialized and became the literary language of education (books, newspapers, media, and lectures) all over the Arab world. On the other hand, every Arab country maintained its own dialect that was used in daily interaction. A huge number of grammar books was published that explained how MSA and the different dialects should be spoken, and, of course, written in the case of the former. Few works were published about Arabic communicative tasks in real world situations. Consider the situation where people have to indicate something or to point out something. When faced with this situation – whether trying to indicate objects they like, objects that are alike, objects that are confusing etc. – people usually use different kinds of referencing, along with nonverbal gestures, that are conventionally divided by linguists into four major types: deictic, anaphoric, exophoric, and symbolic. This thesis is limited to Arabic deictic spatial referencing, mainly the use of [haða] ‘this’ and [ðalika] ‘that’ in MSA and in spoken Arabic, specifically the Levantine and Gulf dialects. The main aim is to 1 investigate the reality of the demonstratives in the physical world as articulated by Arabs and Arab Americans. This research will compare native speakers of Arabic, people who were born and who lived in an Arab country and acquired Arabic as their first language, and Arab Americans, people who were born in America and acquired Arabic along with English in a minority Arabic speaking community. The Arab subjects were mainly from the Gulf area (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and UAE) and Lebanon. The Arab Americans were of Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi, and Egyptian origins. The motivation behind this comparison is a study done by Kelly-Lopez (2005) entitled ‘The Reality of This and That ’. The study came to the conclusion that native speakers of English and hence native speech “did not follow the traditional definitions of this and that presented in dictionaries” (p. 28). They used these deictic terms interchangeably. In contrast, the responses of non-native speakers of English were consistent with grammatical definitions. The final conclusion drawn from the study was that “native speech must be defined in a manner that states, native speech is any articulation of a native speaker ” (p. 30). Further the author suggested that grammatical rules may be responsible for “non- native-speaker-like speech behaviors.” In the present study I originally wanted to investigate the reality of [haða] ‘this’ and [ðalika] ‘that’ in Arabic with the intention of proving that these communicative tasks do not adhere to the definitions presented in grammar books and dictionaries. The motivation was an earlier unpublished study that I have done whereby I investigated age as a possible variable in the articulation of deictic referencing and where the results showed that this and that were used interchangeably by English speakers and that age 2 plays a significant role in the articulation of this and that . However, after reading Kelly- Lopez’s study I was curious about another point, i.e., the status of Arab Americans. Are they properly considered native speakers of Arabic? If so, do they exhibit the same communicative properties of Arabs born in an Arab country? If they do not have the same communicative tasks, will they be considered non-native speakers of Arabic – of course bearing in mind Kelly-Lopez’s study? 3 Research Construction This entire research is based on the framework of hard science linguistics (HSL) established by Yngve (1996) whereby linguistics is defined as the scientific study of people communicating in real world situations. Yngve’s aim is to elevate the status of linguistics from the philosophical domain to the scientific domain that bases its findings and validates them through scientific methodologies. In other words, the linguist is to observe, come up with a hypothesis, and test this hypothesis in the physical world by comparing the predications of the hypothesis against further abstractions. This means that the linguist’s data should be collected from real observations recorded in a specific place and a specific time. This approach is in direct opposition with the traditional one where linguists gather their data from introspection; i.e., their data is made-up, self- created to support their theories and, therefore, has no real value in the physical world. Thus, language is an abstract system that has no tangible reality. Its long established components – semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonology – are also not real and they cannot be observed. It follows then that words, haða ‘this’ and ðalika ‘that’ in this case, are also not real; when we read these words or when we hear them, we are only “projecting properties of ourselves onto the external causes of sights and perceived sounds” (Coleman 2004, p. 15). Therefore, when we want to observe people communicating it is imperative that we make sure not to confuse these subjective projections with objective reality, and to take into consideration the key elements of an assemblage, Yngve (1996), a “group of people together with their linguistically relevant 4 surroundings involved in particular communicative behavior” (p. 86). Elements of an assemblage include participants or communicating individuals, channels (sound and light waves emitted from the communicating individuals along with the non-verbal gestures that these individuals perform), props or physical objects, and finally, the setting in which communication is taking place. These elements, joined together, are the basis for any successful and meaningful communication.