
Mohammed ShormaniIbb University · Department of English Studies
Mohammed Shormani
Doctor of Philosophy
About
86
Publications
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Introduction
I am a linguist working on Generative Syntax, Phonology-morphology Interface, Syntax-discourse Interface, Philology. I am also interested in Language Acquisition, Psycholinguistics, Neurolinguistics, Language Pathology, E-learning, Translation, Artificial Intelligence-in-Language Study, published thoroughly on these phenomena, and supervising MA/PhD Theses on these areas of Language Inquiry.
Additional affiliations
September 2019 - present
Education
May 2008 - September 2011
November 2005 - February 2007
Publications
Publications (86)
The issue of how a null subject (or argumental pro) is licensed and interpreted has been a matter of debate in syntactic theory for decades. Participating in this debate, this paper proposes a novel approach to the licensing and interpretation of the referential 3 (person) pro/topic in human languages, based on discourse-syntax interface. I provide...
Vocative expressions have been neglected in linguistic inquiry until very recently. This article provides a novel approach to the study of vocatives based on correlating the syntax and discourse at the interface. Syntactically, we provide empirical evidence that vocatives are visible to syntactic computation, belong to the C-domain, and discoursall...
In this paper, I investigate vocative expressions in Ibbi Arabic, a dialect of Yemeni Arabic, and a very under-investigated language variety. I examine this phenomenon in terms of functions, types and approach. The study shows that vocatives in Yemeni Arabic have several and various social/pragmatic functions, and that any constituent and any synta...
This study strives to answer one major question: Does culture translate?, employing the translation of English proverbs into Arabic by senior students majoring in English. The study involves 30 English proverbs collected from different sources, based on three criteria, namely complete Arabic equivalence, partial Arabic equivalence and zero Arabic e...
The Syntax of Multiple Wh-questions in Yemeni (Ibbi) Arabic A Long-distance Agreement Approach
E-learning can enhance learners' collaboration and interaction synchronously or asynchronously via utilizing Web 2.0 platforms. Yet blog utility in EFL contexts could have serious challenges. So, this study explored the most serious challenges perceived by Yemeni EFL Level-II students, English Department, Faculty of Arts, Ibb University, in 2023-20...
Examining and studying semantic errors in second language acquisition (SLA) is an interesting and challenging area of investigation which is still fertile requiring much more research. In spite of the considerable number of investigations into lexical errors, very few studies have tackled semantic errors committed by SL learners. Thus, this study a...
This article aims to study the acquisition of English regular inflections by L1 Yemeni Arabic speakers and the role of UG in this acquisition, adopting a minimalist approach. 30 students were recruited as participants of the study. They are selected randomly from level three and four students, studying at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts,...
This study sets out to answer one major question: Who thinks better, non-native speakers of English or ChatGPT?, providing evidence from processing and interpreting center-embedding English constructions that human brain surpasses ChatGPT, and that ChatGPT cannot be regarded as a theory of language. Fifteen non-native speakers of English were recru...
Background
This study aimed to answer the following major question: Who thinks better, non-native speakers of English or ChatGPT?. It provides evidence from processing and interpreting center-embedding English constructions that the human brain surpasses ChatGPT and that ChatGPT cannot be regarded as a theory of language.
Methods
Fifteen non-nativ...
This study provides a comprehensive analysis of artificial intelligence (AI) contribution to translation industry (ACTI) research, synthesizing it over forty-one years from 1980-2024. 13220 articles were retrieved from three sources, namely WoS, Scopus, and Lens. We provided two types of analysis, viz., scientometric and thematic, focusing on clust...
There is a strong correlation between linguistics and artificial intelligence (AI), best manifested by deep learning language models. This study provides a thorough scientometric analysis of this correlation, synthesizing the intellectual production during 51 years, from 1974 to 2024. It involves 5750 Web of Science-indexed articles published in 21...
This article provides an empirical study on rethinking teaching culture and its impact on learning language in second language (L2) teaching classroom. The study sample consists of twenty students majoring in English as participants, from third-and fourth-year students, Department of English and Translation, AlQalam University, Yemen. The participa...
The purpose of this study is to examine the success and failure of ChatGPT in translating some Arabic free poetry texts selected from Wahib's 'Hulm 'ala Nasiat Aljabin 'A Dream on the Corners of Nostalgia'. In this study, we examined ChatGPT's ability in translation field. In particular, the focus is on translation in Arabic context. The free poetr...
This article deals with AI and translation industry ............
This study sets out to answer one major question: Can ChatGPT capture swearing nuances? It presents an empirical study on the ability of ChatGPT to translate Arabic oath expressions into English. 30 Arabic oath expressions were collected from the literature. These 30 oaths were first translated via ChatGPT and then analyzed and compared to the huma...
Negative imperatives in general have received less research compared to positive imperatives cross-linguistically, which is perhaps due to their complex nature. This article studies Yemeni Arabic (YA) negative imperatives, probing their syntactic and discourse properties, and proposing a syntax–discourse interface amalgamated with phase approach to...
This study sets out to answer one major question: do linguistic phenomena relating to syntax-discourse interface constitute difficulty for Yemeni learners of English? It presents data from an experiment on the acquisition of L2 English wh- interrogatives by L1 Yemeni Arabic speakers, aiming to provide empirical evidence either in support of the Int...
I was fascinated when I came to know that there is “Arabic” spoken in Cyprus, which aroused several questions in me as to how this language came into existence, how it is spoken now, what changes to its linguistic modules take place due to language contact with other languages, what its status now is, etc. This article, thus, aims to investigate th...
Oaths are mostly a culture-embedded linguistic component and this to such an extent that their translation to other languages may be questionable. This study investigates the translation potential or translatability of (Yemeni) Arabic oath expressions into English. It tries to answer whether (Yemeni) Arabic oath expressions (un)translatable into En...
Cypriot Arabic: some phonological and syntactic changes from Mainstream Arabic, a paper presented at the International Conference on HLS 2 Heritage Language Syntax, held at Utrecht University on 15-17 December, 2021.
The purpose of this article is to provide an analysis of imperatives in Arabic based on the syntactic, discourse and interface properties these structures have. I argue that the ultimate interpretation of imperatives involves a correlation of the syntax and discourse at the interface. The interface role is required by interpretive imports, and mani...
In this article, we propose a novel approach to impersonalpassive in null subject languages (NSLs), and elsewhere, basedmainly on Pers (on) feature. This Person feature is associated witha silent unpronounced pronoun, i.e. pro, in finite passive clauses. Itis proposed that pro is the external argument of impersonal passive,hence abstracting away fr...
This chapter surveys the development and current state of e-learning in The Republic of Yemen. The authors survey the general social, economic, historical and demographic background of Yemen and provide a review of its educational system. Analysis and statistics on the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure, usage of ICT in...
That the syntax of free genitive constructions in Semitics is related to two components: syntax and morphology is well-documented cross-linguistically. The affixal nature of the (in)def article necessitates that it is affixed to the head N in morphology, giving rise to either Def-N or N-Indef. In this article, I propose a novel analysis to Semitic...
To argue against a long established assumption seems to be not that easy task. In this article, I argue against one of those assumptions, namely (in)definiteness spread in Semitic Construct State (CS). I argue that CSs are of two types: either definite or indefinite. The former refers to those CSs, where the head N is syntactically definite, in the...
We develop a novel approach to personal passive in Standard Arabic (SA), building on 'implicit arguments' and the Person feature associated with the passive morphology (PM) attached to the verb. We propose that the PM is projected as a PassP (Passive Phrase), headed by Pass which has a Person (Prsn) feature which counts as an EPP feature. The artic...
In this paper, I tackle vocative expressions in Ibbi Arabic, a dialect of Yemeni Arabic, and a very under-investigated language variety. I study this phenomenon in terms of functions, types and approach. The study shows that vocatives in Yemeni Arabic have several and various social/pragmatic functions, and that any constituent and of any syntactic...
That Noun Phrases (or DPs) are phases is a debated issue in the current minimalist syntax. A phase is said to be a unit of syntactic computation that can be sent to the PF and LF interfaces as an independent syntactic chunk (Chomsky 2000, et seq). In this article, support is added to the claim that Noun Phrases are phases. In particular, I show tha...
Phase theory has been viewed as a promising approach to syntactic phenomena, minimizing the machinery apparatus needed to describe them, and meeting the „limited‟ capacity of human language faculty. A phase is said to be a unit of syntactic computation that can be sent to the PF and LF interfaces as an independent syntactic chunk (Chomsky 2000, et...
Linguists, language teachers and educators are most of the time confronted with questions as to what knowledge of language is, how it develops in children, how they acquire it, etc. If the assumption that children are innately, genetically and biologically endowed with a language faculty is correct, then, again several other questions are imposed....
The issue of how a null subject (or argumental pro) is licensed and interpreted has been a matter of debate in the syntactic theory for decades. Participating in this debate, this paper proposes a novel approach to the licensing and interpretation of the referential 3 (Person) pro/topic in human languages, based on discourse-syntax interface. I pro...
An L2 learner is distinguished from another inasmuch as he/she has a good command on formulaic language like collocations which are deemed to be very specific to native speakers of a language being part of their competence and intuition. If this is true, it follows that English collocation, for instance, will be difficult for those learning it as a...
How language, be it first (L1) or second (L2), is acquired has been the concern of much research and investigation, and perhaps no other phenomenon has witnessed such interest (Shormani, 2014b). One such area within language acquisition is collocability and how it presents a difficult aspect to L2 acquirers. This is so due to the fact that collocab...
Language acquisition (LA) is one of the widely researched topics, and perhaps the most. It is really a complex process that has not been fully accounted for yet. There are as many questions remaining as there are many facts that have been discovered in such a field and hence an adequate characterization of such a phenomenon is still a matter of cur...
It goes without saying that probing deeply the sources of errors committed by an L2 learner is a psycholinguistic process which is not an easy task. In fact, investigations into learner's errors reveal that English as a Second/Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) teachers expect their students to speak errorless English (Burt, 1975), however, errors keep rec...