Abstract
This paper compares written and spoken versions of film-based narratives elicited from native speakers of Jordanian Arabic, focusing on two main differences that emerged between the two versions: (1) Case marking: Overt case marking, assumed a key means of differentiating standard and colloquial , turned out to be distinctive only in the rare cases when diacritics were in fact added to the word-final consonant, so that no clear evidence could be attested for use/non-use of case marking. (2) Nominalization: Distinct means were used to substitute for the lack of a morphologically marked infinitive in both standard and colloquial Arabic: the written texts in our sample relied heavily on derived nominals, which are far less common in their spoken counterparts. The study sheds fresh light on grammatical differences between spoken and written usage in contemporary Arabic, while its corpus-based approach points to new avenues for research on Arabic dialectology and applications to language pedagogy.
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Notes
- 1.
Preparation of the film and collection of data were funded by a grant from the German-Israel Foundation for Scientific R & D [GIF] to Ruth A. Berman and Christiane von Stutterheim, University of Heidelberg for the study of “The Impact of L1 on Advanced Learner Language: A Cross-linguistic Study of Spoken and Written Usage” [G.I.F. Research Grant No. 1–789-109.4/2003]. The authors are indebted to Dr. Hana Hirzalla for her cooperation and generous assistance with on-site data-collection in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
- 2.
Examples are rendered in broad phonemic transcription for the written versions and in phonetic form of the spoken pronunciation. The numbers in square brackets indicate the serial number of each participant in the group, wr = written text, sp = spoken, and a/b refer to the order in which the two texts were produced.
- 3.
Interestingly, a closely parallel phenomenon characterizes current Hebrew usage, where be- + Abstract Nominal forms are preferred for expression of manner adverbs over and above by bound suffixation to adjectives (Berman and Nir 2011b).
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Laks, L., Berman, R. (2014). A New Look at Diglossia: Modality-Driven Distinctions between Spoken and Written Narratives in Jordanian Arabic. In: Saiegh-Haddad, E., Joshi, R. (eds) Handbook of Arabic Literacy. Literacy Studies, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8545-7_11
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