In this research, we examine the productivity of the broken plural in Maltese. Using machine learning techniques and behavioral methods, we show that the broken plural is able to be predicted by a singular noun’s CV structure. Using a logistic regression classifier, we are able to correctly predict the plural CV structure of the singular noun w…[Read more]

Corpus Linguistics and NLP have many obvious applications for researchers, academics, and other specialists; what should not be overlooked, however, is their role in improving the mundane, everyday interactions between people and language, be they a reader of a newspaper; a child with a storybook; or a student in a classroom. The language analyses…[Read more]

“Making a Tibetan Speech Corpus” — སྐད་ཕུང་སྒྲུབ་སྟངས་ཀྱི་ལག་དེབ། — is a beginner’s guide and training manual for collecting & transcribing natural speech data. While it was written specifically with the Tibetan language in mind, the principles within are generally applicable. The first chapter introduces linguistics, corpora, and practical…[Read more]

MA thesis from the Department of Language & Linguistics at the University of Essex

Review of Language and Identity in Modern Egypt by Reem Bassiouney

uncorrected proofs

Review of Making Waves: The Story of Variationist Sociolinguistics by Sali Tagliamonte

Contribution to the Encyclopedia of Arabic Language & Linguistics

Special issue from the conference on Discourses on Death

This study presents findings from sociolinguistic fieldwork on Palestinian Arabic conducted in the Gaza Strip. The sample includes 15 speakers who are indigenous residents of Gaza City, representing three age groups and both genders. Linear mixed effects analyses are presented on the vowel raising of the Arabic feminine gender marker; a word final…[Read more]

The history of Palestine has caused communities to be displaced and relocated, entailing that speech communities have been dismantled and created anew. The coastal cities of Jaffa and Gaza exemplify this reality. This study analyzes speakers from Jaffa, some of whom remained there and others residing in Gaza as refugees. Through an examination of…[Read more]

Although a great deal has been written about the Gaza Strip within the fields of political science, history, and international relations, very little linguistic research has been conducted in the coastal territory. This study aims at filling one gap in the linguistic record of Gaza through an examination of one set of phonemes, the Arabic…[Read more]

Given its abundance of dialects, varieties, styles and registers, Arabic lends itself easily to the study of language variation and change. It is spoken by some 300 million people in an area spanning roughly from northwest Africa to the Persian Gulf. Traditional Arabic dialectology has dealt predominantly with geographical variation. However, in…[Read more]

Despite prominent attention to the nature of the state in the social sciences, the place of language in creating and maintaining the state remains an emerging area of research. The analysis that follows investigates indeterminacy and illegibility in messages disseminated by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip. This analysis highlights the ways…[Read more]

Arabic is often investigated within dialectological frameworks that emerged in the 19th century, though that work now exists alongside decades of variationist sociolinguistic research. The latter method typically produces abundant data, recorded at very high quality, which lend themselves to being transcribed, described and preserved. This paper…[Read more]

This study examines the effect of dialect contact between the indigenous residents of Gaza City and refugees originally from the city of Jaffa. The study offers a quantitative sociolinguistic investigation of the variable (q) in the speech of 22 residents of Gaza City. The sample is divided along the lines of dialect background and gender, and it…[Read more]

Project Abstract: Ancient Mesopotamia, birthplace of writing, has produced vast numbers of cuneiform tablets that only a handful of highly specialized scholars are able to read. The task of studying them is so labor intensive that the vast majority have not yet been translated, with the result that their contents are not accessible either to…[Read more]

Bunun is a language spoken by one of the Austronesian minority groups on the island of Taiwan. Its most marked characteristics are its complex verbal morphology and its unusual argument alignment system. Takivatan Bunun is the third-largest of its five extant dialects and is spoken by a number of small settlements in two counties in the central…[Read more]

Missionary history has been acknowledged in recent years as a fundamental context for the emergence of European Orientalism. In particular, it is becoming clearer the specific cultural relevance of the Catholic missionaries to India, working under the Portuguese Royal Patronage (Padroado Real), depending from the Roman Congregation De Propaganda…[Read more]

Talk Abstract