- Jahrgang 2021 (2021)
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- Ausgabe 74
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- Seiten 61 - 86
- pp. 61 - 86
Case and mood inflection in Formal Spoken Arabic – a quantitative investigation
Seiten 61 - 86
DOI https://doi.org/10.13173/zeitarabling.74.0061
This article presents results from a quantitative investigation of the use of
case and mood inflection (CMI) in seventeen televised news-interviews (38,000
words) with Arab politicians and public figures with a variety of backgrounds.
The speech of the interviewees was transcribed and annotated for realization of
CMI and for relevant morphosyntactic parameters. Speakers were found to vary in
the amount of CMI in their speech, but all perform far below the prescriptive
ideal, with realizations of case inflection ranging from 0.2% to 42.3% (mean
7.5%, median 3.6%) and mood inflection from 0% to 68.5% (mean 9.9%, median
2.5%). Furthermore, speakers show striking similarities in how the CMI that they
do use is distributed in morphosyntactic contexts. First, CMI is for all
speakers used at markedly higher rates in words with enclitic pronouns and on
words where CMI is orthographically represented. Second, for words with definite
article, CMI is almost completely absent. Implications of these results for
Arabic language instruction are discussed.
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