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Corpus Study of Tense, Aspect, and Modality in Diglossic Speech in Cairene Arabic

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Corpus Study of Tense, Aspect, and Modality in Diglossic Speech in Cairene Arabic CORPUS STUDY OF TENSE, ASPECT, AND MODALITY IN DIGLOSSIC SPEECH IN CAIRENE ARABIC BY OLA AHMED MOSHREF DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Elabbas Benmamoun, Chair Professor Eyamba Bokamba Professor Rakesh M. Bhatt Assistant Professor Marina Terkourafi ABSTRACT Morpho-syntactic features of Modern Standard Arabic mix intricately with those of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic in ordinary speech. I study the lexical, phonological and syntactic features of verb phrase morphemes and constituents in different tenses, aspects, moods. A corpus of over 3000 phrases was collected from religious, political/economic and sports interviews on four Egyptian satellite TV channels. The computational analysis of the data shows that systematic and content morphemes from both varieties of Arabic combine in principled ways. Syntactic considerations play a critical role with regard to the frequency and direction of code-switching between the negative marker, subject, or complement on one hand and the verb on the other. Morph-syntactic constraints regulate different types of discourse but more formal topics may exhibit more mixing between Colloquial aspect or future markers and Standard verbs. ii To the One Arab Dream that will come true inshaa’ Allah! عربية أنا.. أميت دمها خري الدماء.. كما يقول أيب الشاعر العراقي: بدر شاكر السياب Arab I am.. My nation’s blood is the finest.. As my father says Iraqi Poet: Badr Shaker Elsayyab iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I’m sincerely thankful to my advisor Prof. Elabbas Benmamoun, who during the six years of my study at UIUC was always kind, caring and supportive on the personal and academic levels. I also acknowledge the support and encouragement of the kind-hearted and wise Prof. Eyamba Bokamba. The skepticism and scientific zeal of Prof. Marina Terkourafi have always gained my admiration and appreciation. This work is also indebted to three colleagues at the department of Linguistics at UIUC. One long and very enlightening discussion with Bezza Ayalew helped me crystallize and pin down the procedure and methodology of my research. In the design and processing of the computational program, I benefited from the expertise of Tim Mahrt and Mahmoud Abu Nasser, who have ever and always been available to rescue in difficult times. Tim was also very kind to proof-read the thesis in a notably short period of time. I’m very thankful to the three of them. As an international student away from my home country, I cherish the emotional, friendly, and family like atmosphere that my close circle of colleagues at the department of Linguistics and wider at UIUC has constantly established. I mention in particular my Arab colleagues: Noha Elsakka, Eman Saadah, Rania Al-Sabbagh, Fatemah Herms, and last but never least Abdelaadim Bidaoui, in addition to my semi-Arab friend and colleague beautiful Angela Selena Williams. iv Table of Contents Chapter I: Problem, motivation, and scope of study ........................................................................1 I-1 MSA and ECA ...............................................................................................................1 I-2 Codeswitching in diglossic languages............................................................................8 I-3 Code-switching in distant languages ............................................................................11 Chapter II: Major theoretical approaches to code-switching .........................................................14 II-1 The Two Constraints Theory & the Government Principle ........................................14 II-2 The Matrix Language Frame (MLF) hypothesis ........................................................20 II-3 Optimality Theory and the typology of code-switching .............................................23 II-4 The Dual Language Model (DLM) .............................................................................27 Chapter III: Codeswitching in Arabic ............................................................................................33 III-1 Corpora and methodologies .......................................................................................33 III-2 Approaches to Arabic code-switching .......................................................................37 Chapter IV: Tense, Aspect, Modality ............................................................................................57 IV-1 The Arabic verb composition ....................................................................................57 IV-2 Verb Negation in Arabic ...........................................................................................64 IV-3 Constituents of the Arabic verb phrase .....................................................................72 IV-4 Tense and Aspect.......................................................................................................80 IV-5 Modality ..................................................................................................................120 Chapter V: Methodology .............................................................................................................127 V-1 Data collection ..........................................................................................................127 V-2 Classification of data ................................................................................................128 v V-3 Inter-phrase partitioning ...........................................................................................130 V-4 Variety labeling of constituents ................................................................................132 V-5 Procedure of data analysis ........................................................................................136 Chapter VI: Data analysis and results ..........................................................................................141 VI-1 Code-switching at phrase levels ..............................................................................142 VI-2 Comparison by discourse topic ...............................................................................170 Chapter VII: Discussion and conclusion......................................................................................176 References ....................................................................................................................................187 Appendix A: Transcription gloss .................................................................................................195 Appendix B: Abbreviations .........................................................................................................196 Appendix C: CS comparison by Tense, Aspect, Modality ..........................................................198 Appendix C-1: Collective results for verb level ..............................................................198 Appendix C-2: Collective results for subject-verb with no intervening markers ............201 Appendix C-3: Collective results for complement-verb with no intervening markers ....205 Appendix C-4: Collective results for case-marked complement-subject combinations ..209 Appendix D: CS comparison by discourse ..................................................................................211 Appendix D-1: MSA verb stems with ECA aspectual prefix ..........................................211 Appendix D-2: MSA Future markers in corpus ...............................................................214 Appendix D-3: MSA Negative markers in corpus ...........................................................215 vi Chapter I: Problem, motivation, and scope of study The structure of the verb phrase in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) differs in some phonological, lexical, syntactic, and morphological aspects from Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA). It is, thus, a good indicator of how the standard and colloquial varieties interact in spontaneous diglossic speech. The objective of this study is to explore the sentential constituents, ranging from the morphemic up to the lexical and phrasal levels, control standard-colloquial mixing. Verbal phrases include all different combinations of tense, aspect, and mood in spoken discourse. Data is collected from interviews in four Egyptian satellite TV channels and the topics of the interviews are religious, political/economic, and sport. I-1 MSA and ECA One of Ferguson’s nine features of diglossia is stability over centuries with consistent borrowing from the high variety H into the low variety L, resulting in the development of intermediate language forms (Ferguson, 1959:332). This is typical of the growing mix between ECA, and MSA. ECA is a vernacular that has urban and rural variations. Its tense/aspect system of affixes is regarded by some researchers as more complex than MSA (Owens, 2006:26). In this research ECA will refer to Cairene Arabic. Versteegh (2001) traces the current form of this variety to the end of the nineteenth century “when the flux of speakers from the countryside led to stigmatization of the rural dialects that has continued until today. As a result, new migrants to the capital tend to shift wherever possible to Cairene Arabic (p.197). 1 MSA is the modern form of Classical Arabic (CA). It attained its current position as a result of contact with western culture and
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