Marwan Jarrah

University of Jordan | UJ · Department of English Language and Literature

Using the Criterial Freezing approach to movement and chain formation (Rizzi 2005, 2006, 2014; Rizzi and Shlonsky 2006, 2007), this study explores the strategies Jordanian Arabic makes available for subject extraction. I argue that subject extraction in this variety of Arabic is constrained by the postulated D-linking condition of the Subject Crite...

This research investigates the morpho-syntactic behaviour of the Arabic complementizer ʔinn in a range of Arabic varieties (Modern Standard Arabic, Jordanian Arabic, and Lebanese Arabic). It essentially argues that this complementizer shares (not donates or keeps , pace Ouali 2008, 2011) its unvalued $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}$ -features with its comp...

This paper investigates (un)marked word orders in embedded clauses in Jordanian Arabic (JA), motivating a mono-clausal analysis of them. It shows that topic in this Arabic dialect is not a unique category nor susceptible to a single analysis, hence providing support for proposals that argue for topics typology (see Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl 2007...

Empirical evidence is provided for the existence of a discourse-related area between TP and vP in Jordanian Arabic (JA), a finding which is line with Belletti's (2004, 2005) model of the low IP area in natural languages. A two million-word corpus of naturally occurring data from JA, supported by grammaticality judgements from 50 JA speakers, reveal...

Contra Chomsky (2007, 2008), this paper argues that there is no Φ-dependency between C0 and T0 in Jordanian Arabic (JA) grammar. C0 and T0 are independently endowed with uΦ-content, something that turns them into active probes, which are shown not to agree necessarily with the same goal. This provides evidence for a proposal where T0 and C0 have di...

Purpose. This article investigates the distribution of overt and null subject pronouns in Ammani Arabic (AA) from a variationist perspective, identifying social and linguistic constraints that shape pronoun expression. The study examines how age, gender, and educational attainment, alongside grammatical person, sentence polarity (positive vs. negat...

This research article provides evidence from Jordanian Arabic (JA) that negation is syntactically bound to the projection of a phasal head, wherein NegP is structurally licensed to project exclusively within phase-bound configurations. Therefore, NegP can project separately in CP and v*P, offering support to the multi-locus view (Alqassas 2012. The...

This article examines the significant phenomenon of the use of what we term "Urban Ammani Arabic" (UAA) by most adult female speakers in the Amman metropolitan area, particularly when this dialect differs from the one they acquire or use in their domestic environments. To explore this, 132 adult female speakers were selected to participate in both...

Developing critical thinking and effective communication skills through argumentative essays is crucial to the success of university students. This study aims to identify the most engaging strategies used in teaching writing argumentative essays for university students. In spite of this, identifying the most engaging strategies to teach this skill...

The term ‘explicatures’ pertains to the inferential developments made of utterances with the objective of attaining a greater degree of clarity by the speaker (Sperber and Wilson 1986). It was first introduced by relevance theory to provide evidence that the explicit part of communication may contain a pragmatically inferred material, which facilit...

This article explores how illnesses are linguistically expressed in Jordanian Arabic (JA). It also investigates the extent to which religion and social norms influence this expression. To this end, we collected authentic data from a number of interactions of JA speakers, particularly within interactive radio and TV programs addressing various life...

This book provides an excellent overview of important aspects of Arabic sociolinguistics (e.g. the effect of gender, age, education, social stratification, and religion and ethnicity in constraining the variable expression of several linguistic features). It outlines the key themes and concepts of (variationist) sociolinguistics, such as vernacular...

This research paper investigates the variable use of intensifiers in Ottawa English. Following the key tenets of the variationist approach, we analysed data from Ottawa English Corpus in order to check the correlation between a number of social (age & gender) and linguistic (syntactic position, semantic class, positive/negative and emotional/non-em...

This study aims to investigate the sociolinguistic variation of Noun Phrase (NP) genitive alternatives in Jordanian Arabic (JA) as spoken in Amman. It attempts to examine the role of certain linguistic factors i.e., animacy, definiteness, alienability, complexity, and grammatical function as well as social factors, i.e., age, gender, education, and...

This article provides evidence from Arabic (namely Modern Standard Arabic and Jordanian Arabic) that ɸ-Agree with an element which undergoes a phonological deletion at PF, i.e., a pro, results in the occurrence of a ɸ-inflection of the goal on the relevant probe. This occurrence is imposed by the effects of a suggested interface condition, named as...

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 study explores the use of interactional 1 metadiscourse by first language (L1) and second language (L2) English editorialists. The study uses Hyland's (2019) model of metadiscourse to analyse 80 editorials published between 2020 and 2021 in The Guardian and The Jordan Times newspapers (40 from each newspaper). A mixed-method approach-adopting...

Jordanian Arabic (JA) has two main patterns for verbal negation, i.e., preverbal negation (ma: ….) and discontinuous negation (ma: …. -ʃ). This article provides a variationist account of the distribution of these two patterns in light of a number of social and linguistic factors. The social factors include age, gender, educational attainment and re...

This study seeks to explore the major errors that frequently emerge when novice translators translate technical texts, namely legal documents released by the Department of Lands and Survey in Jordan. The goal behind this investigation is to improve legal translation training, develop students’ drafts based on the types of their mistakes, and delive...

This study investigates the production of Arabic intervocalic geminate obstruents as produced by American L2 learners of Arabic. The participants of the study were 24 Arabic learners (12 advanced, 12 beginners) at North Georgia University and 12 native speakers of Jordanian Arabic (the control group). An examination of the results reveals that nati...

Many researchers have investigated the pragmatic meanings and interpretations of religious expressions, especially in Arabic and Muslim contexts. One main property of such expressions is that they are pragmatically multi-purpose expressions whose semantic content has a peripheral contribution to the utterance while their pragmatic force is salient....

This article offers evidence that object dropping in Arabic, and particularly in Jordanian Arabic, is pragmatically marked, i.e., it manifests certain pragmatic meanings. Based on the interpretation of utterances with dropped objects, extracted from a naturally occurring corpus, we argue that speakers who drop their objects normally express emotive...

This study explores the effect of the workplace on language use by Jordanian working women in terms of variety, lexis, and pronunciation. To this end, the study adopted a triangulation of research methods utilising qualitative and quantitative analyses, i.e. a questionnaire, ethnographic field notes, and interviews. Ethnographic field notes were ta...

Although euphemism has been studied in many Arabic dialects, it has not yet received due attention in Iraqi Arabic (IA). This study investigates the use of euphemistic strategies by IA speakers and the effect of gender and degree of formality on the use of these strategies. In order to achieve these objectives, a discourse completion test (DCT) was...

This study investigates the use of interactive metadiscourse markers in first language (L1) and second language (L2) English editorials. It also identifies how L1 and L2 editorials differ in the use of these markers. To this end, the study utilizes Hyland's (2019) model of interactive metadiscourse to analyse-based on a descriptive approach-80 edit...

This article, which reports on an experimental study based on data obtained from 86 native speakers of Northern Rural Jordanian Arabic (NRJA), offers empirical evidence that emphasis spread can apply bidirectionally across word edges when they are prosodically word internal. In other words, emphasis can spread from one word to a neighboring (plain)...

This study investigates the use and linguistic properties of refusal strategies by Jordanians and Syrian refugees in Jordan. To achieve this objective, a Discourse Completion Test (DCT), consisting of 10 situations: three requests, three offers, two invitations, and two suggestions was used. The participants were 40 (20 male and 20 female) Jordania...

This study investigates the efficacy of the type of instruction (i.e., perception-based vs. production-based) on second language (L2) pronunciation acquisition in an English as a foreign language (EFL) context. To achieve this objective, 60 tertiary-level Jordanian learners of English were recruited and put into two groups (30 learners in each grou...

This article offers evidence, which is based on acceptability judgement tasks, in favour of the absence of unmarked linear serializations of stacked, non-coordinated adjectives in Jordanian Arabic (JA). Results from 16 experiments of acceptability judgements from 197 native speakers of JA point to the fact that JA places no adjective ordering. Howe...

This article provides a descriptive account of the major uses of the speech verb dire “to say” in Vernacular French. CLAPI Corpus (Corpus de Langue Parlée en Interaction), which is a multimedia database of corpora recorded in real situations (i.e. professional, institutional, commercial, didactic, and medical) is used. Five major uses of the verb d...

This study examines the realizations of variable /ð/ sound in Ammani Arabic (AA) as well as the correlation between this variation and a number of sociolinguistic factors. Four phonetic variants ([ð], [d], [z] and [ðˤ]), four social factors (sex, age, region and educational attainment) and two linguistic factors (the position of the variant in the...

In this article, we examine the syntactic derivation of subject wh-words in Jordanian Arabic. Firstly, we provide empirical evidence that questions with a subject wh-word are syntactically derived by overt movement of the given subject wh-word to the left periphery. This empirical evidence is based on the position of the subject wh-words to the lef...

This article explores which areas of explicature identification (i.e., disambiguation, reference resolution, saturation, free enrichment, and ad hoc concept constructions) were more attended to in Arabic-English translation. Twenty translators were asked to render from one language into another 50 sentences whose logical form could be enriched by e...

Based on facts of adjectival concord in Standard Arabic, this article offers evidence that upward probing (i.e., the goal c-commands the probe) is only permitted if downward probing (i.e., the probe c-commands the goal) does not result in valuing the probe’s uninterpretable feature (uF). Such a constraint on upward probing allows us to account for...

Little research has related DMs to (im)politeness, and none in Jordanian Arabic (JA). This study provides evidence that (im)politeness can categorize interactive DMs into polite DMs and impolite DMs in JA. It aims to explore the use of DMs in JA in relation to (im)politeness dichotomy. Twenty-two episodes of three different Jordanian radio shows wh...

This research article provides evidence from Jordanian Arabic (JA) that passive predicates, unlike unaccusative predicates, project phases. Two tests are formulated to demonstrate this difference, namely long-distance agreement (between T⁰ and the internal argument) and quantifier stranding. Following Alexiadou et al. (2006), Alexiadou and Doron (2...

Following Alqarni (2020), this research article provides a pragmatic undertaking of evil eye as a constructed speech act, with a particular focus on data from Colloquial Jordanian Arabic (CJA), whose culture has not been significantly examined in this regard. Firstly, the research article demonstrates that Jordanian eyers use a set of linguistic st...

This study explores the use and functions of engagement strategies in English and Arabic newspaper editorials. To this end, the study analyses 80 editorials collected from two popular newspapers (40 from each): The Guardian which publishes in English and appears in the UK and Addustour which publishes in Arabic and appears in Jordan. Following Palt...

The present paper explores φ-agreement patterns between C0 ʔinn ‘that’ and the local subject in eight Arabic dialects. Four distinct patterns of φ-agreement are identified. In Pattern I dialects, C0 displays obligatory φ-agreement with a pro subject but optional φ-agreement with the non-pro subject. In Pattern II dialects, C0 shows obligatory φ-agr...

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 offers a morphosyntactic account of the observation that the general dividing classifier ħabbit ‘a grain of’ in Jordanian Arabic (JA) can express another unpredictable interpretation when it is combined with non-count nominals. When ħabbit occurs with nominals that refer to [-animate] collectives (granular aggregates, legumes, nuts and...

This paper investigates a subclass of questions of which wh-word appears question-finally in Jordanian Arabic. It proposes that such questions are syntactically derived by the movement of the wh-word to the left periphery of the question (i.e. the Spec of Focus Phrase; cf. Rizzi 1997), followed directly by the movement of the remnant TP to a higher...

Following Alshamari (2017) and Jarrah (2019), this paper offers evidence in favor of systematic interactions of morphological case, ɸ-agreement and overt movement in Arabic grammar. It argues that these three aspects of grammar serve one specific purpose, i.e., to record (i.e., express) Agree dependencies (of the Agree operation; cf. Chomsky, 2001)...

This article investigates the morphosyntactic behavior of the diminutive morpheme -aaj in three Arabic dialects (Egyptian Arabic, Syrian Arabic, and Jordanian Arabic). It argues that this morpheme is categorially a head that projects Size Phrase (cf. De Belder, Marijke. 2008. Size matters: Towards a syntactic decomposition of countability. In Natas...

This research paper provides a syntactic account of the observation that plurals of non-count nouns (i.e., collective and mass nouns) in Jordanian Arabic (JA) may express different readings, namely a counting reading and paucity in quantity. We propose that availability of such readings or lack thereof depend crucially on whether or not Division Ph...

This study aims to examine emphatic assimilation across morpheme boundaries in Jordanian Arabic (JA). Our research is based on word-list data comprising 86 words uttered by 12 native speakers of JA, recorded and acoustically analyzed in Praat for a total of 1032 tokens. The consonants of the bound morphemes tested include the genitive/accusative su...

This study aims to identify the intensifiers used in Ammani Arabic and to explore whether or not their use is socially constrained by age, gender, and education. Furthermore, the study attempts to find whether the use of intensifiers throughout this dialect is internally constrained through the examination of the effects of a set of linguistic fact...

This study aims to explore the use of euphemistic strategies by Algerians and Americans when dealing with three unpleasant topics: death, lying, and disease. It also examines the effect of degree of formality on the use of euphemistic strategies. To achieve this objective, a discourse completion task (DCT) was designed by the authors and distribute...

This study aims to examine the extent to which the alternation between the common negation patterns of verbless clauses in Ammani Arabic, namely [mu] and [miʃ], is socially constrained. Gender, age, level of education and region (West Amman vs. East Amman) were investigated in this regard. Twenty-five hours of audio-recorded sociolinguistic intervi...

This article investigates the discourse functions of ʕaad in Jordanian Arabic (JA), based on a naturally occurring corpus which consists of 20 sociolinguistic interviews with 60 participants. Upon analysing all occurrences of ʕaad in the corpus, we propose that ʕaad is a discourse marker that provides supplementary information that relates the spea...

This research article offers empirical evidence from Standard Arabic (SA) that an existing structural case assigned on an element by one head can be overridden by a new structural case assigned by a different head as long as the element (or one of its copies) has not become part of any previous transfer domain defined by the Phase Impenetrability C...

Much work on emphatic segments in Arabic dialects has focused on primary emphasis. However, secondary emphasis has been less of a target of study. Our research investigates the emphatic variation of the secondarily emphatic labio-velar /w/ between males and females in two Jordanian Arabic sub-dialects: Rural Jordanian Arabic and Urban Jordanian Ara...

Much work on emphatic segments in Arabic dialects has focused on primary emphasis. However, secondary emphasis has been less of a target of study. Our research investigates the emphatic variation of the secondarily emphatic labio-velar /w/ between males and females in two Jordanian Arabic sub-dialects: Rural Jordanian Arabic and Urban Jordanian Ara...

This study investigates the use of concessive discourse markers in Jordanian Arabic (JA), particularly relying on a corpus analysis of naturally occurring data. It argues that there are mainly two types of concession in JA: extrinsic concession and intrinsic concession. The two types of concession are shown to differ from each other with respect to...

This research investigates the functions of the verb 'to say' in the Jordanian Arabic dialect of Irbid (JADI). Relying on a 250,000-word corpus, we propose that the speech verb 'to say' in JADI has one main lexical function (i.e. introducing direct or indirect speech) in addition to three functions which the verb develops, i.e. expressing the speak...

This research paper investigates the functions of the broken plural in Rural Jordanian Arabic (RJA), offering a syntactic account of these functions within Borer’s (2005) Exo-Skeletal model. It argues that the broken plural in RJA can be a lexical item that functions as a categorizing head merging under n0 with a root of a non-count noun. In such c...

This study explores the acquisition of Arabic and English relative clauses by L2 English and Arabic learners. It examines the extent to which the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH) (Keenan and Comrie 1977) and the Markedness Differential Hypothesis (MDH) (Eckman 1977) account for the acquisition of English and Arabic relative pronouns by En...

This article explores the low IP area of Najdi Arabic, with special reference to a construction involving a post-verbal object that is resumed on the verb (as in The man saw-her the woman). We provide evidence that the object is a topic in the low IP area in such cases. However, the position of the object in the low IP area is masked by the movemen...

In this volume, Alqassas provides analysis of negation in a range of Arabic varieties, most notably Jordanian Arabic (JA), Qatari Arabic (QA) and (Modern) Standard Arabic (SA), strongly advocating for a multi-locus analysis of negation in these varieties. He also partially investigates some issues related to the structural positions of negation, in...

This study shows that the discourse particle tara in Jordanian Arabic identifies whether its utterance presents new or given information. In other words, there exists a relation between the presence of this particle (i.e., its position) and the type of information packaging of its utterance. When tara appears utterance-initially, the accompanying u...

This paper explores the use of bound forms in coordination constructions and ʔijjā and ʔijja in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Jordanian Arabic (JA), respectively. Using the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2005) as a theoretical framework, the paper proposes that the use of bound forms in such constructions is ruled by a Phonetic-Form con...

This research paper shows that the deictic temporal marker ʔilʔa:n 'now' has developed a discourse function of organizing the ongoing discourse. This latter use helps the hearer appreciate the underlying structure of the relevant discourse, hence providing pragmatic clues that maximise the hearer-speaker communication. Additionally, based on a corp...

This research paper provides a syntactic account of the observation that plurals of non-count nouns (i.e., collective and mass nouns) in Jordanian Arabic (JA) may express different readings, namely a counting reading and paucity in quantity. We propose that the availability of such readings or lack thereof depends crucially on whether or not Divisi...

This research paper investigates the syntax of idiomatic expressions consisting of the verb and the object/accompanying adjunct (VP idiomatic expressions, henceforth) in two Arabic varieties: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Jordanian Arabic (JA). It shows that in order for VP idiomatic expressions to obtain their idiomatic reading, the predominate...

In this volume, Alqassas provides analysis of negation in a range of Arabic varieties, most notably Jordanian Arabic (JA), Qatari Arabic (QA), and (Modern) Standard Arabic (SA), strongly advocating for a multi-locus analysis of negation in these varieties. He also partially investigates some related issues to the structural position of negation, in...

The present study examines the use of English lexical insertions to create humour by Jordanian university students. The data of the study are collected from spontaneous tape-recorded conversations from 62 participants of both males and females, representing different age groups (from 18-23 years old) and belonging to different specializations (e.g....

This research paper aims to explore blended learning implementation in universities that are on a low-budget, essentially determining the more important steps to invest in during the initial stage of implementation; investing in costly IT infrastructure or training faculty for student-centered learning and relevant pedagogies. A survey of 254 stude...

This paper shows that the head noun of the Construct State (CS) may ɸ-agree (in Number and Gender) with the accompanying DP associate in Jordanian Arabic (JA). When it occurs, this agreement is, however, only invoked when the DP associate is referential (e.g., galam ʔil-walad ‘the boy’s pen’ > galamuhi ʔil-waladi, but barbiiʃ ʔil-ʁaaz ‘the gas pipe...

This study investigates the stylistic features that mark the creation of powerlessness, and ultimately “otherness,” in fiction. To this end, this study focuses on two fictional characters: Jelka Sepic in John Steinbeck’s “The Murder” and the old man in Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” Most of the clauses associated wit...

This paper explores the use of bound forms in coordination constructions and ʔijjā and ʔijja in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Jordanian Arabic (JA), respectively. Using the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2005) as a theoretical framework, the paper proposes that the use of bound forms in such constructions is ruled by a Phonetic-Form con...

This research paper investigates the discourse functions of the wh-word ʃuː ‘what’ in Jordanian Arabic (JA). Based on the analysis of a naturally occurring corpus, it was found that ʃuː has developed a discourse function alongside its lexical uses as an interrogative operator, an exclamative particle, and a relativizer. Upon analyzing all tokens of...

This study investigates adverb hierarchy in Jordanian Arabic (henceforth JA). It utilizes Cinque’s (1999) universal adverb hierarchy, a cross-linguistically-attested model of the structural placement of adverbs. Under this model, adverbs occupy distinct positions in discrete functional projections whose order is rigidly fixed. It examines the valid...

In this paper, we first argue against Alahdal's (2018) account of feature inheritance of the Edge Feature (EF) from C0 to T0 in null subject languages (NSLs), including (Modern Standard) Arabic. Alahdal proposes that Spec,TP becomes a position that exhibits A/A-bar properties in Arabic when T0 inherits EF from C0. We explore the defects of this arg...

This paper shows that wh-formation in Jordanian Arabic (JA) is prosodically ruled. Wh-words should move either to the left or to the right periphery of the phonological phrase that contains the relevant wh-word. What appears as an in-situ instance of a wh-question in JA, as reported by several studies, is in fact a true instance of a moved wh-word...

narrow syntax (i.e. before the spell-out point) (Yasin 2012 and Jarrah 2017): (1) a. miin ʃaaf ʔisˤ-sˤabi who saw.3SG.M the-boy ‘Who saw the boy?’ b. eeʃ/ʃuu ʔimħammad laga b-l-mizraʕah ʕind ʔil-karum what Mohamamd found.3SG.M in-the-farm next to the-vineyard ‘What did Mohamamd find in the farm, next to the vineyard?’ c. mata dʒaab-u ʔis-sijjaarah...

This paper investigates subject extraction from embedded clauses in Jordanian Arabic (JA). Firstly, it shows that JA maintains the division between factive vs. non-factive verbs with respect to (subject) extraction. We argue that non-factive clausal complements are not islands for extraction, and, hence, their subject can undergo movement to the le...

This research investigates the syntax of the particle ʃikil in Jordanian Arabic (JA). It argues that this particle expresses indirect evidentiality, i.e. the speaker relies on indirect evidence (e.g. inference, third-party reports, etc.) as the information source for his proposition. The study also argues that ʃikil heads Moodevidential Phrase (cf....

This article investigates the sound and broken plural formation in Northern Rural Jordanian Arabic. Concisely, it seeks an explanation why many nouns in this Arabic variety are irregularly pluralized (e.g. dʒabal  Ɂɪdʒba:l) whereas only few are regularly pluralized (muʔalim  mʔalm-iin). While repudiating the long-standing views which attribute th...

This research scrutinizes the observation that when the thematic subject is extracted (i.e. questioned) in Jordanian Arabic, temporal/locative inversion may occur. Temporal inversion occurs irrespective of the verb being transitive or intransitive, whereas locative inversion is limited to contexts with an unaccusative verb. This research argues tha...

This thesis proposes a minimalist and cartographic analysis of A-bar movement in Jordanian Arabic (JA) with a particular focus on subject extraction. Adopting the Criterial Freezing approach to A-bar movement and chain formation (Rizzi 2005, 2006, 2014, Rizzi and Shlonsky 2006, 2007), it argues that Spec,SubjP in this Arabic variety is a criterial...

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...

The present study aims at explaining how the Relevance Theory could be a viable approach to weigh up the main functions of some concessive Pragmatic Operators (henceforth POs) in Jordanian Arabic at the production and interpretation levels. A sample of twenty-two speeches delivered by members of the Jordanian Parliament the 16th was randomly select...