Disagreeing in Tunisian Arabic: a Politeness and Pragmatic Study

This research is a pragmatic and politeness study that deals with the speech act of disagreement in Tunisian Arabic, a variety of Arabic spoken in Tunisia. It accounts for disagreement in relation to the contextual factors of Social Distance, Social Power, and Rank of Imposition. Discourse Completion Test (DCT) is used to study the production of disagreement. Data was collected from a group of native speakers of Tunisian Arabic at “Institut Supérieur des Langues de Tunis, Tunisia”. Native speakers of TA used a variety of strategies, which were identified in other languages (e.g., Direct Refusal, Suggestion, Giving Account, and Request…) along with new strategies (e.g., Teasing, Unsympathetic advice, Challenge, and Criticism).The identification and quantification of the strategies of disagreement also helped develop insights into the Tunisian culture.

Early Detection of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s Diseases using the VOT_Mean Feature

Alzheimer’s (AD) and Parkinson’s diseases (PD) are tw of the most common neurological diseases in the world. Several studies have been conducted on the identification of these diseases using speech and laryngeal disorders. Those symptoms can appear even at the early stages of AD and PD, but not in very specific and prominent ways. Voice Onset Time (VOT) is an acoustic specification of the stopping consonant that is commonly discussed in studies of phonetic perception. In this study, the VOT_Mean feature was explored to identify AD and PD early using /pa/, /ka/, and /ta/ syllables for the diadochokinetic task (DDK). VOT_Mean was calculated as the average of the first and the second VOT values (VOT_1 and VOT_2), corresponding to the second and the penultimate VOT measurement cycles. Experimental tests were performed on Tunisian Arabic and Spanish databases for the early detection of AD and PD respectively. The results showed a very high significance of VOT_Mean on the early detection of AD and PD. Moreover, the best results were achieved using the XGBoost (XGBT) algorithm as a classifier on the VOT_Mean feature.

Language policies and multilingualism in modern Tunisia

"In a multicultural and multilingual world, people negotiate their identities along contextual lines. Online mediated information about countries and cultures build bridges at the individual level and create a sense of “global citizenship” (Hortobagyi 2015; 2017). Languages policies and linguistic landscapes facilitate the exploration of the multilingual texture of a country, thus research in imminently multicultural environments fosters a better understanding of multiple linguistic identities. Situated at the intersection of social and language sciences, drawing on relevant literature and using a comparative approach, the presentation highlights Tunisia’s long history of linguistic and political confrontation since its independence from France (Riguet 1984) and focuses on the educational reforms that have been undertaken, particularly on the various policies and guidelines pertaining to modifying the language policy of the country. Since the 1970s, a significant process of Arabization has been underway, alongside the strengthening of bilingual education, which was launched as early as 1956. Considering that English started to be taught in Tunisian schools shortly after the independence (Battenburg 1997), Tunisian education has always been trilingual with English as the most common foreign language added to Arabic and French. The first years of the 21st century were marked by the introduction of additional foreign languages in secondary education, such as Russian, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, German, and Turkish among others. All these policies have allowed Tunisia to access modernity (Messadi 1967 cited in Belazi 1991, 53). Currently, Tunisian Arabic and Berber are languages that have not yet been added to the political agenda. Nevertheless, the return to the standardization of Arabic through teaching, the noticeable decline of the use of French, and the emergence of English as a new alternative, indicate linguistic policies in which multilingualism is becoming the new norm, with manifest representations both at the societal level and in the new media communication."

What makes up a reportable event in a language? Motion events as an important test domain in linguistic typology

Numerous crosslinguistic studies on motion events have been carried out in investigating the scope of the two-fold typology “path versus manner” (Talmy 1985, 2000) and its possible implications. This typological contrast is too narrow as it stands, however, to account for the diversity found both within and across types. The present study is based on what can be termed a process-oriented perspective. It includes the analyses of all relevant conceptual domains notably the domain of temporality, in addition to space, and thus goes beyond previous studies. The languages studied differ typologically as follows: path is typically expressed in the verb in French and Tunisian Arabic in contrast to manner of motion in English and German, while in the temporal domain aspect is expressed grammatically in English and Tunisian Arabic but not in German and French. The study compares the representations which speakers construct when forming a reportable event as a response to video clips showing a series of naturalistic scenes in which an entity moves through space. The analysis includes the following conceptual categories: (1) the privileged event layer (manner vs. path) which drives the selection of breakpoints in the formation of event units when processing the visual input; (2) the privileged category in spatial framing (figure-based/ground-based) and (3) viewpoint aspect (phasal decomposition or not). We assume that each of these three cognitive categories is shaped specifically by language structure (both system and repertoire) and language use (frequency of constructions). The findings reveal systematic differences both across, as well as within, typologically related languages with respect to (1) the basic event type encoded, (2) the changes in quality expressed, (3) the total number of path segments encoded per situation, and (4) the number of path segments packaged into one utterance. The findings reveal what can be termed language-specific default settings along each of the conceptual dimensions and their interrelations which function as language specific attentional templates.

Broken plurals and (mis)matching of ɸ-features in Tunisian Arabic

The aim of this paper is to explain an unusual agreement pattern that arises between Tunisian Arabic broken plurals and their targets. For example, a verb may agree with a plural subject in all ɸ-features or, rather oddly, in singular/feminine, even when the subject (the controller) is masculine plural. Developing an idea first briefly sketched—but ultimately not adopted—by Zabbal (2002), we argue that broken plurals are hybrid nouns. Hybrid nouns have been the topic of much recent research (Corbett, 2000, 2015; den Dikken, 2001; Wechsler and Zlatić, 2003; Danon, 2011, 2013; Matushansky, 2013; Landau, 2015; Smith, 2015): either their syntactic or semantic features can be the target of agreement, creating the possibility of an agreement mismatch. Using Harbour’s (2011, 2014) theory of number, coupled with some innovations, we provide the featural make-up of Tunisian Arabic broken plurals and contrast it with that of collectives, on the one hand, and sound plurals, on the other. We propose that the feminine agreement seen with broken plurals is associated with a [+ group] feature, one that is exponed as -a. In the course of the discussion, we will argue that all gender features are visible at LF (Hammerly, 2018) and that semantic agreement is routinely possible with nouns that are low on the Animacy Hierarchy.

Comparative Basic-Words of Standard Arabic Palestinian and Tunisian

This paper studies comparative linguistics on the process of word-formation that occurs in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), Palestinian Arabic (PLS), and Tunisian Arabic (TNS). It is addressed to portray the process of the verb, adjective, and noun formation in three Arabic languages by using Plag’s theory and to identify sameness and contrariness of basic words by using Hock’s theory. This study used 220 of Morris Swadesh's basic vocabulary as the main guidelines for obtaining data. The criteria were adopted to analyze the data were orthographic, sound-change, phonological and morpheme contrast. This research used descriptive qualitative. The source of the data was basic-word vocabulary. The data were gathered by conducting an in-depth interview with five post-graduate students of the Arabic Department at Universitas Islam Negeri (UIN) Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta as informants to get information. The data were analyzed by using structural linguistics, especially phonology, morphology, and semantics. This investigation informed several aspects of findings such as processes of cognates, back-formation, phonological variations, prefixes, clipping, derivation, acronym, loanword, blending, and metathesis of MSA, PLS and TNS. Using the Swadesh vocabulary list, the results of this study found 207 vocabularies for each language, such as MSA, Tunisian, and Palestinian. Using word categorization, it has found that these vocabularies have categorized into five words classes, namely, nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, determiner.

The Derivation of ‘Verbless’ Sentences in Arabic: A Probe-Goal-Agree Approach

In this paper, I provide an analysis of ‘verbless’ sentences in Arabic (mainly, the Standard variety, SA) in light of the claims of the feature-based probe-goal-Agree system of Chomsky (2001, 2004) and such assumptions as held by Biberauer et al. (2010) about probe-goal Agree relations being parameterized according to the feature-structure of functional elements derived in sentence structure. This analysis is essentially different from previous analyses in the literature relating to ‘verbless’ sentences in Arabic, such as Benmamoun’s (2008). In the present analysis, verbal inflection is the product of the valuation of a T-feature of verbs – i.e., [uT], as the unvalued uninterpretable counterpart of [iT] of tense (T as a node in sentence structure) in the syntax of languages. Using this framework of assumptions, I subsequently extend on Halila’s (1992) analysis of the famma-construction in Tunisian Arabic. In such constructions, famma-raising is the result of the verb-like nature of famma as an auxiliary or copula, which ultimately enters a probe-goal-Agree relation with T for tense interpretation at Logical Form (LF) in the syntax.