Shared Vowels in English Loanwords in Arabic: Variation in Similarity-Based Adaptation

This paper investigates vowel adaptation in English-based loanwords by a group of Saudi Arabic speakers, concentrating exclusively on shared vowels between the two languages. It examines 5 long vowels shared by the two vowel systems in terms of vowel quality and vowel duration in loanword productions by 22 participants and checks them against the properties of the same vowels in native words. To this end, the study performs an acoustic analysis of 660 tokens (loan and native vowel sounds) through Praat to measure the first two formants (F1: vowel height and F2: vowel advancement) of each vowel sound at two temporal points of time (T1: the vowel onset and T2: the peak of the vowel) as well as a durational analysis to examine vowel length. It reports that measurements of the first two formants of vowels in native words appear to be stable during the two temporal points while values of the same vowel sounds occurring in loanwords are fluctuating from T1 to T2 and that durational differences exist between loanword vowels in comparison with vowels of native words in such a way that vowels in native words are longer in duration than the same vowels appearing in loanwords.

Significance of Short Story Cycle in Rachel Joyce’s A Snow Garden and Other Stories: An Analytical Study Using Complexity Theory

Rachel Joyce’s short story collection A Snow Garden and Other Stories (2015) is composed of seven stories which occur during a fortnight of the holiday, Christmas season. The collection uses narrative techniques which make it a unique set of stories. The stories have an urban setting and examine the intricacies of human relationships. The sense of interconnection highlighted by Joyce in the stories elevates it to a short story cycle. A short story cycle consists of individual stories which can stand on their own as complete narratives while also maintaining fictional links running through all the stories. The paper is an attempt to establish A Snow Garden and Other Stories as a short story cycle. It also argues that by narrating the interconnected nature of human lives Joyce’s work is exploring life as a complex system. As a scientific philosophy complexity theory explores the behavior of complex systems including human societies. Complex systems are self-organizing, dynamic, evolving networks that operate without any centralized control, similar to human societies. This paper will apply the principles of complex systems to reveal patterns of human behavior represented in Joyce’s work.

The Effects of L1 Interference on the Occurrence of Code-Switching in the Algerian Context

The sociolinguistic phenomenon of Code-Switching (CS) was addressed in dramatically different academic contexts where English is spoken as a first language (L1) (i.e., inner circle), as a second language (i.e., outer circle), as well as where English is spoken as a foreign language (EFL) (i.e., expanding circle). Nevertheless, very few studies examined the issue of CS among undergraduate students in expanding circle countries such as Algeria. Basically, this study sought to find answers that would, firstly, help apprehend the overriding reason (s) that stimulate the occurrence of CS in the third year students' oral production, secondly, identify the communicative functions of English-Arabic CS in the students' class interaction, and thirdly, gauge its practicality and effectiveness in multilingual classes. Following a qualitative research approach, a case study design was adopted with a purposively (deliberately) chosen sample. Accordingly, data were collected by means of two tools of inquiry, namely observation and an unstructured questionnaire. The findings revealed that the underlying factor that prompted the occurrence of language-switching was the linguistic interference that germinated from the students' L1, among other subsidiary linguistic factors. Furthermore, it was found that CS grants its appliers the opportunity to reiterate what they exactly said in another way, to hold the floor and continue speaking for an extended period, and to insist on what was being communicated. Regarding CS technique, it was concluded that it might be considered as a productive and, simultaneously, a detrimental communication strategy to develop EFL students’ speaking competence. Finally, the findings of this study supported the initially formulated hypotheses, and, thus, reported positive results.

Ideological Manipulation in Twitter Communication: A Critical Stylistic Analysis of Donald Trump's Tweets

Donald Trump’s use of Twitter as a modality to defame opponents, antagonize media outlets and even glorify violence is an enduring legacy for political campaigns, presidential rhetoric and argumentative debates. This nontraditional use of social media as a political communication tool has invited Twitter’s fact-checking editorial decisions, alienated some of Trump’s supporters and attracted worldwide criticism. Using purposive sampling, the present paper employs the ten textual-conceptual functions of critical stylistics to analyze a dataset of Trump’s tweets on domestic and international political issues published between 2011 and 2020 and assembled from the monitor corpus Trump Twitter Archive. The critical stylistic analysis aims at uncovering Trump’s ideological outlook by identifying the extra layer of meaning in which the ideological evaluation is structured and exposing the way in which the resources of language are strategically deployed to influence and ideologically manipulate Trump’s followers’ experience of reality. Analysis reveals a network of lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic choices underlying Trump’s seemingly simple rhetoric. It signposts his ideological evaluation and constructs a world for his followers to desire, believe or fear. The study extends the application of critical stylistics to microblogging channels, with implications both for the linguistic make-up of political communication in Web 2.0 contexts and for the explanatory power of critical stylistics.

Effect of Language Learning Strategies and Teacher versus Peer Feedback on Reducing Lexical Errors of University Learners

This study examined the effects of language learning strategies (LLS) and coded corrective feedback on reducing four types of lexical errors made by two student groups, one receiving teacher corrective feedback (TCF) and the other peer corrective feedback (PCF). Participants (n=34) were divided into two groups; one group (n=17) received TCF and the second group (n=17) received PCF. Both groups were trained in applying LLS to revise, in response to their respective feedback, coded lexical errors they had made in three practice essays. The study used the Sequential Explanatory strategy of the Mixed Methods’ Design Strategies to compare the groups’ lexical error performance on immediate and delayed post-tests. Findings showed that participants in the PCF group significantly outperformed their TCF counterparts and reduced overall lexical errors at the delayed post-test (week 16). Also, the PCF group reduced ‘unnecessary’ and ‘redundant’ word errors at the delayed post-test, though not significantly. Analysis of students’ reflections, written after training, revealed that students depended on gut feeling and prior experience to revise their errors; they restructured sentences when they could not correct lexical errors and considered collocation errors difficult to correct. Pedagogical implications include adopting specific methods of vocabulary teaching and meaningful error feedback.

Stress Misassignment in the Pronunciation of English by Arabic-speaking Learners: Erratic Practice or Crosslinguistic Influence?

The role of L1 interference in English stress assignment produced by Arabic-speaking EFL learners has received little research attention. This study aims to investigate whether faulty stress assignment by Arab learners is arbitrary or systematic. It also attempts to discover a linkage, if any, between Arabic phonotactic rules of stress placement and stress misplacement in English by Saudi learners. 120 learners from Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University were randomly chosen from 3 different levels of English proficiency (lower-intermediate, upper-intermediate, advanced); they were asked to pronounce 72 stimulus words that covered all morpho-syllabic word structures that the learners often mispronounced. The recordings were analysed using WASP spectrogram software and also by two independent raters. Results strongly indicated that crosslinguistic influence may have caused the learners to consistently a) place the stress on a specific syllable in a word even when this word has multiple stress assignments with a difference in meaning, b) stress the second item in a compound noun instead of the first, c) place the stress on the penultimate syllable of most polysyllabic words, d) place the stress on the second syllable of contracted negative auxiliary verbs , and e) misplace stress irrespective of their level of English proficiency.

Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” Revisited: A New Perspective

Though Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” has often been interpreted, categorized or dismissed as a poem on idealized patriotism, its underlying nationalistic and colonialist/imperialist dimensions have not been duly treated alongside its patriotic dimension. Since the 1980s, there has been a resurgence of interest in such interrelated themes as patriotism, nationalism, and postcolonialism due to the engagement of some political, philosophical, and literary theorists with a wide range of conceptual and moral debates. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine Brooke’s poem in greater detail and, consequently, to update the previous research on this poem in light of these debates. The main thesis of the paper is that Brook’s “The Soldier” is a multifaceted poem which has a variety of different features which can be interpreted on various levels, namely patriotism, nationalism, and colonialism/imperialism.

Persuasive Strategies of Saudi EFL Learners

The aim of this study is to investigate the speech act of persuasion used by Saudis learning English as a foreign language (EFL). Moreover, we seek to explore the differences between genders in the use of these strategies. The participants are 50 males and 50 females at level 7 of their bachelor’s degree in English. Data are collected using the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) method, which contains six scenarios similar to real-life situations. Data are analysed quantitatively using the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project nine-point rating scale, Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, and Chi-square. The results of the DCT reveal that Saudi EFL learners use more direct strategies in English, namely hedge performatives and performatives. In addition, males are shown to be more inclined to use direct persuasive strategies compared to females. This research will benefit language learners, teachers, and researchers, as it highlights linguistic aspects of the speech act of persuasion that should be considered when learning and teaching a foreign language. The implications of this study inspire future research into different aspects of speech acts.

Secondary Grammaticalization: The Case of hatta in Rural Jordanian Arabic

Secondary grammaticalization is viewed as a continuation to a grammaticalization path (Traugott 2002) or an independent process that does not necessarily imply the occurrence of a precedent primary grammaticalization (Givón 1991). This paper provides a case from vernacular Arabic supporting the second view, namely, the secondary grammaticalization of the functional hatta (its evolution into a proclitic) in Rural Jordanian Arabic. Evidence supporting this view is the selectivity of secondary grammaticalization, which can be summarized as follows: if the source grammatical item has more than one type (i.e., function), some of these types may not undergo secondary grammaticalization. This implies that secondary grammaticalization may not be a late stage completing a grammaticalization path. It can be an independent process that has its own peculiarities and constraints. The constraint, which is the source of selectivity of secondary grammaticalization in this paper, is linked to prosodic prominence: if a grammatical item is typically prominent prosodically in daily conversations, it resists secondary grammaticalization. This finding should also contribute to the previously reported constraints on secondary grammaticalization. In addition to selectivity, it is reported in this paper that the lexical source of the grammatical hatta does not seem necessary to its secondary grammaticalization.

Kuwaiti Women Writers and Anglophone Choices: Charting New Territories

While there has been a plethora of work on Arab women writers, little attention has been paid to Kuwaiti women writers, especially those who write Anglophone literature. This research paper argues that the choice to write in English rather than Arabic leaves these writers in a problematic position. As a result of embracing the English language, rather than their mother tongue, they are left outside of the dominant literary circle and often marginalized. Through a literary analysis, this paper presents some of the texts written by contemporary Kuwaiti writers who have chosen to write in English, and have produced nuanced narratives of Kuwaiti women who find agency and self-expression through their fictional journeys. These journeys explore themes of agency, voice, and trauma. A significant contribution of the present paper lies in a thematic analysis of lesser-known Kuwaiti texts in order to excavate these marginalized voices. The findings suggest that by choosing to write in English, these writers face the dangers of being dismissed from the literary canon, just like their protagonists must contend with society’s discrimination and expectations.