Aseel Zibin

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at University of Jordan

This article investigates the observation that the object of obligatorily transitive verbs in Jordanian Arabic cannot drop in VSO clauses but can in SVO clauses as long as its ref-erent is already mentioned in the previous discourse of an accompanying utterance. When object drop takes place, the subject of the accompanying clause should be a [+defi...

This study aims to examine the impact of social media on interpersonal communication patterns in Jordan and determine whether there are gender differences. Through adopting a mixed-methods approach, quantitative data were collected using a structured questionnaire from a sample of 50 Facebook users in Jordan chosen based on a self-selection method,...

This study examines the impact of gender as a social factor on the lexical variation of the Jordanian currency, dinar, among students at the University of Jordan. Utilizing a mixed-method approach, the study aims to determine whether the role of gender is statistically significant in the choices among different lexical variants of the terms. For qu...

This study explores the metaphorical and metonymical expressions of sadness and joy in French idiomatic expressions, collected from various media sources and YouTube channels. Using a qualitative research design, it applies the Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory to analyze how these emotions are conceptualized through image schemas, domains, and m...

This study explores a specific category of construct states in Arabic, which involves the use of filial words to form the construct head, producing what we refer to as “filial construct states”, e.g., bana:t llajl, which literally translates to “daughters of the night” meaning “dreams”. Using a manually collected specialized corpus, and adopting Co...

This study aims to explore the target concepts of metonymical and metaphorical uses of ‘head’ in Jordanian Arabic (JA) compared to those used in Tunisian Arabic (TA). Extended conceptual metaphor theory (ECMT) as envisaged by Kövecses (2020, Review of Cognitive Linguistics , 18 , 112–-130) is adopted as the theoretical framework. Data analysis reve...

This study examines the semantic variation in fruit and vegetable classifier usage in Amman, Jordan, employing a cognitive sociolinguistic approach. The semantic variation revolves around using idiomatic classifiers, such as raːs basˤal (“head of onion”), in contrast to neutral classifiers, i.e., ħabbet basˤal (“a piece of onion”) or numerals, such...

This study examines the visual [monomodal] and multimodal metaphorical representations of Jordanians’ perceptions and attitudes toward the amended Cyber Crime Law in Jordan as depicted by Jordanian activists and image creators online. It adopts Forceville’s theory of Multimodal Metaphor [1, 2] as its theoretical framework. Twenty visual and multimo...

Within the cognitive paradigm, metaphors are said to play a key role “not just in language but in thought and action” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: p. 3). As a form of action, genocide in recent human history has been incited by metaphor, with Holocaust Jews as “parasites” (Musolff 2010), Iraqis as “rapists” (Lakoff 1991), Rwandan Tutsis as “cockroach...

This study examines how well Arabic-speaking EFL undergraduate students can understand gender-definite articles in French. Forty students studying French language and literature at the University of Jordan’s Faculty of Foreign Languages were equally divided into two groups based on their French language proficiency level (sophomores and seniors). H...

Most papers written on polysemy focus on sense overlaps and lexical ambiguity, yet studies that explore the possibility of establishing a polysemic complex and explaining how the new interpretations arise through metaphor are almost non-existent in Arabic. This paper aims to explore how metaphor serves to create new concepts as part of polysemic co...

This special issue explores metaphor across languages, cultures, and discourses, bringing together papers that reflect the diversity and scope of this research area. The aim is to foster discussion and exchange ideas concerning the role of metaphor in conceptualization, persuasion, and the construction of meaning. In this introductory article, we f...

Indexical meanings of the realization of /sˤ/ ‫ﺹ‬ as [s] ‫ﺱ‬ in spoken and written Jordanian Arabic: a language change in progress? Abstract: This study examines how the phonetic realisation of the phoneme /sˤ/ and its orthographic form ‫ﺹ‬ is surfacing as the variant [s] in speaking and as ‫ﺱ‬ in writing in Ammani Arabic (AA), which is a variety o...

Compound nouns, whether metaphorical or otherwise, are compact and image-evoking linguistic structures widely used in news headlines. However, a review of the relevant literature shows that they have not been examined in the context of news headlines in Arabic media. Hence, this study aims to identify the role of metaphoric and catchy noun compound...

This paper examines the utilization of Arabic tautological expressions, provided by customers as a reiteration of an element of an English compound such as 'apple pie' [fatˁi:rit ʔabil bai 'an apple pie pie'], from the perspective of Relevance Theory (RT). Data was collected from 90 participants, divided into two groups: 40 native speaker informant...

Purpose Due to the high expense of obtaining and accessing scientific research, readers with diverse financial abilities are not offered equal opportunities. This study investigates the preferences for journal access types among Arab university academics and explores the implications of publishing research articles in open access vs closed access j...

Numerous studies suggest that children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) encounter language problems related to syntax. In particular, these children face difficulties in comprehending and answering complex language structures in Arabic. This paper examines whether a prototype Arabic assistive application can have an impact on the ability of chil...

This study investigates the use of monomodal and multimodal metaphors in Jordanian and American advertisements for promoting food products on Facebook. 180 advertisements including monomodal and multimodal metaphors were collected from the Facebook pages of 12 famous restaurants in Jordan and the USA. The analysis shows that monomodal and multimoda...

This study aims to examine the function of metaphor modality (monomodal and multimodal) in a corpus of 250 memes collected from two Jordanian-based Facebook pages called “مطب – Bump” and “فيل زهري – Feel Zahri [pink elephant].” The 250 memes were shared on these Facebook pages between January 2019 and January 2020. The study adopts Conceptual Metap...

This study analyzes 30 cartoons depicting THE DEAL OF THE CENTURY as envisaged by two Jordanian cartoonists. Conceptual Blending Theory (Fauconnier and Turner [2008, Cam-bridge handbook of metaphor and thought, Cambridge University Press, 53-66]) and Multimodal Metaphor Theory (Forceville, 2008) are adopted as theoretical frameworks. The results re...

This study investigates identity salience of four types of identities; national, religious, cultural and global, for Ammani people in view of the post-structuralist perspective on identity (Baxter 2016). It also examines the extent to which age, gender and the social context affect identity change and stability in light of Communication Accommodati...

This article aims to analyze the translation of Arabic metaphors into English in Naguib Mahfuz’s novel Zuqaq Al-Midaq (1966), which Trevor Le Gassick translated as Midaq Alley . With conceptual metaphor theory based on the notion of main meaning focus ( Kövecses 2017 ) and the cogno-cultural approach ( Al-Zoubi, Al-Ali, and Al-Hasnawi’s 2007 ) as i...

This study explores the monomodal and multimodal metaphors used in 80 cartoons by 11 Jordanian cartoonists to depict the coronavirus. The study adopts Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Multimodal Metaphor Theory as its theoretical framework. The results reveal that several source domains (object, human, monster, weapon, and food) were employed to depi...

Purpose Despite the fact that the gender-based violence (GBV) term has different interpretations, leading to the assumption that all types of harmful acts against all gender identities and either sex will be addressed under the GBV umbrella, in reality, GBV remains to be synonymous with violence against women (VAW). Thus, this paper aims to assess...

Purpose. This paper examines whether irregular past verbs are acquired earlier than regular past verbs by Arabic-speaking EFL children. Methods and procedure. Ninety fifth graders were tested using pictures representing 20 regular and 20 irregular past tense verbs through a sentence completion task. An introspective session was conducted with 70 ch...

While conceptual metaphors yield various linguistic expressions that reflect conceptual mappings between the source and target domains, there is another type of metaphor which is also constructed cognitively except that these metaphors are “single”, in the sense that they are not reflected by several metaphorical expressions. These metaphors do not...

This study examines love and beloved metaphors from the cross-cultural perspective of Jordanian Arabic (JA) and English. The conceptual models suggested by Lakoff and Johnson ( 1980 , 1999 ) and Kövecses (2014) and force dynamics proposed by Talmy (1988) are adopted as the theoretical frameworks for this study. The data was collected from contempor...

Purpose This paper aims to discuss the main reasons behind the tension between accountability to donors and accountability to beneficiaries, in terms of obtaining the basic needs and human rights of the latter. Relying on three arguments; firstly, based on Angela Crack’s (2013) theory of the three waves of accountability, the authors argue that the...

This study aims to examine the metaphors, metonymies and their interaction in Jordanian Arabic (ja) to conceptualize anger. It also investigates the differences/similarities in the conceptualization of anger in ja and English to determine if culture has a role in its metaphorical and metonymical conceptualization. The study adopts Conceptual Metaph...

This study reviews three university ranking methodologies: Quacquarelli Sysmonds University Rankings, The Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Academic Ranking of World Universities. It also aims to suggest two new methodologies, one for World University Ranking and one for Arab University Rankin...

This study aims to examine the target concepts of metaphorical and metonymical uses of blood in Jordanian Arabic (JA) through adopting Conceptual Metaphor Theory as based on the notion of main meaning focus (Kövecses, 2010, 2011) as a theoretical framework. A 40,000 words specialized corpus was built for the purposes of this study. Data was analyze...

This study examines the monomodal and multimodal metaphors and metonymies employed in 25 proopposition cartoons depicting the Syrian conflict by the Jordanian cartoonist Emad Hajjaj. These cartoons were sketched and published between 2011 and 2018. The method adopted for the analysis is based on the framework presented by Bounegru and Forceville (2...

This study examines the ability of Arabic-speaking-children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to acquire the Arabic grammatical gender. It also explores whether the use of visual stimuli can be effective to acquire it. Using the experimental design of a pre-and post-test, 14 children with ASD were tested twice on the same items after a...

This study aims to examine the metaphors used to describe Syrian refugees in Jordanian politico-economic discourse, adopting a Critical Metaphor Analysis Approach for data analysis. I compiled a specialised corpus containing political and economic articles from two daily Jordanian newspapers. The data was analysed using WordSmith Tools (Scott 2012)...

This study aims to examine the comprehension of L2 metonymies by Arabic-speaking EFL learners and to investigate the extent to which the participants’ L1 conceptual and linguistic knowledge of metonymies can affect the processing of L2 metonymies. A comprehension task was administered to elicit data, and the results showed that the participants enc...

The grammatical category ‘feminine’ has been viewed in various ways in the relevant literature, typically as the marked member of the category Gender (henceforth Gen), i. e. denoting sex (Kibort & Greville 2008) and/or animacy (Dahl 2000). It enters into an Agree relation in Chomsky’s work (1995; 2000) and as such is interpretable on the controller...

This study aims to examine the use of English loanwords inflected with Arabic morphemes by young people in Amman, Jordan. It adopts a quantitative corpus-based approach supported by qualitative data. We collected data from young Facebook male and female users who come from families with different socio-economic status, and we conducted semi-structu...

This study investigates the conceptualisation of tolerance via metaphors in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) press media after proclaiming 2019 as the 'Year of Tolerance'. The results revealed that various source domains are used to conceptualise tolerance, reflecting certain aspects of the Emirati culture and affecting the Emirati cultural model of...

This study aims to examine the figurative devices used in Jordanian Arabic (JA) to conceptualise the emotion of FEAR. It investigates whether FEAR in JA can be conceptualised: (1) universally, on the basis of human embodied experiences; and (2) socioculturally, on the basis of culture specific schemas. The study adopts Conceptual Metaphor Theory (C...

This article tackles a phenomenon in Urban Jordanian Arabic (UJA) where young individuals (mainly females) in Amman, the capital of Jordan, add the Arabic suffix -ɪk, which is glossed as second female singular or as a possessive pronoun, to English loanwords to sound more “modern,” for example, “I love you” becomes [lʌvvɪk]. Through examining the d...

Abstract The current study aims to provide a description of the causative-anticausative alternation in Jordanian Arabic (henceforth, JA), focusing on the structural, morphological and semantic characteristics of causative and anticausative verbs. I adopt a non-derivational approach (i.e. the common-base approach), in which the two variants share a...

This study investigates the effect of blended learning on the development of clause combining as an aspect of the acquisition of written discourse by Jordanians who are learning English as a foreign language. Sixty participants majoring in English language at the University of Jordan took part in this study. The participants were divided into treat...

This study aims to identify the metaphors and metonymies used to describe economic concepts in Jordanian economic discourse pre- and post-Arab Spring in order to examine whether the events of the Arab Spring have had an impact on these figurative devices. This study also examines whether metaphor and metonymy can be affected by the social and cultu...

This study provides an analysis of Arabic metaphorical and/or metonymical compounds, extracted from a 20,000­word corpus, based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory. The analysis focuses on the semantic transparency of these compounds, on the one hand, and their linguistic creativity, on the other. In line with Benczes (2006...

This study provides an analysis of Arabic metaphorical and/or metonymical compounds, extracted from a 20,000-word corpus, based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory. The analysis focuses on the semantic transparency of these compounds, on the one hand, and their linguistic creativity, on the other. In line with Benczes (2006...

This paper investigates whether V + V combinations in Jordanian Arabic (JA) and English could be classified as either serial verb constructions (SVCs) or V + V compounds. Through applying the cross-linguistic criteria of SVC, which have been established in the relevant literature, it seems that V + V combinations in JA and what have been considered...

This study aims to examine the effect of incidental learning on the comprehension of 30 English affixes by 50 Arabic-speaking EFL learners in an attempt to determine which affixes are more easily comprehended. We adopt the experimental design of a pre- and post-test to measure the participants’ knowledge of English affixes before and after the trea...

This research study investigates nunation (Arabic tanwi:n) in Haili Arabic (HA). Haili Arabic is a dialect spoken mainly in Hail, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). It argues that the nunation suffix,-n, is used to fill the position of the head in a determiner phrase (i.e. the head Dº position) when the latter is not occupied by the definite articl...

This study explores the ability of Jordanian learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) to produce English metaphorical and metonymical expressions, using a completion task. It also examines whether the use of conceptual and linguistic knowledge of the participants' first language, i.e. Jordanian Arabic (JA) would facilitate the production tas...

The main objective of the current study was to test whether Advanced Jordanian EFL learners have acquired the English causative alternation. To this end, we used a Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) to determine whether the participants would be able to distinguish between alternating and non-alternating causative/inchoative verbs. The verbs used i...

This study explores the ability of Jordanian learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) to comprehend metaphorical expressions in English and investigates whether the use of their first language (L1) conceptual and linguistic knowledge may facilitate the comprehension of these expressions. For this purpose, the study adopts a contrastive model...

The current research argues that definiteness in Arabic can be used for formal purposes. The definite article and the nunnation suffix -n (NnnS) manage the information flow in the sentence through maintaining accepted informativity balance. Additionally, the study assumes that NnnS, -n, is not an indefinite article. Its main function is rather to s...

Societies are defined by their cultures which are deeply entrenched in their minds, and thus reflected in the way they perceive the world around them, and in their communication with others. Hence, this study investigates the extent to which Arab EFL students' understanding of culturally loaded words is similar to that of native speakers of English...

This paper provides an analysis of Al-ibdaal 'substitution' phenomenon found in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) derivational processes, particularly, in the pattern ftaʕal. Al-ibdaal 'substitution' is defined in many Arabic morphological books (Al-Raagihi, 1984; Al-Galaayiini, 1991) as removing a letter and replacing it by another. For example, the /t...

This paper provided a linguistic analysis of five Arabic proverbs taken from the Palestinian culture. The five proverbs were analyzed in terms of sound features, cohesion and lexical expressions. The analysis showed how the uniqueness of the structure and content of proverbs make them informative and memorable. The proverbs were given to 10 native...

This study explored the acquisition of metaphorical expressions by Jordanian EFL learners at the University of Jordan. In particular, it investigated EFL learners' ability to comprehend and produce metaphorical expressions in English and whether using their conceptual and linguistic knowledge of their first language i.e. Jordanian Spoken Arabic (JS...