This study aims to explore and tackle different phenomena of syllable structure and syllabification patterns in Jordanian Arabic (JA). The study compares and contrasts the permissible syllable structures in different Jordanian dialects. It also presents a comprehensive analysis of how speakers of different Jordanian dialects tackle the consonantal…

The paper is an in-depth study of how the principles and rules of the metrical theory of phonology have found their way to apply to Iraqi Arabic words and expressions. Iraqi lexical items have amassed evidence illustrating that both foot and stress are the hub of phonological designs of parametric prominence entailed in mapping and building up…

Based on data from numerous languages, such as English, Frisian, and Danish, Merchant (2001) proposes the "preposition stranding generalization" (PSG), which states that only languages that allow preposition stranding under wh-movement also allow preposition stranding under sluicing. The availability of this generalization has been the…

Literature on early language acquisition has observed that age of onset of acquisition (AoA) is relevant for certain grammatical phenomena. Simultaneous bilinguals receive regular and extensive exposure to two languages from birth (Müller, 2009), whereas sequential child learners get in extensive contact to L[subscript B] once the L[subscript A]…

Haugen's model (in "Sociolinguistics," Penguin, Harmondsworth, pp 97-111, 1972 [1966]) of standardisation has been widely adopted in general histories of particular languages, not least because of its clarity and simplicity. In this article, I focus on its treatment of codification, with a view to suggesting refinements to this part of…

Over 50 years ago, the Norwegian-American linguist Einar Haugen published a seminal paper entitled 'Dialect, language and nation' (Am Anthropol 68:922-935, 1966b), in which he expounds his four-step model of standardization, explaining the development from dialect to standard following a process of norm selection, codification, acceptance and…

This paper addresses the complexity of the linguistic situation in China by examining the language policy and language categorisation in the People's Republic of China (PRC), which has implications for how multilingual speakers conceptualise and practice 'language'. In addition, this paper examines the conceptual framework of translanguaging and…

What almost all accounts of standardisation histories have in common is a focus on printed, formal or literary texts from writing elites. While Haugen identified the written form of a language as "a significant and probably crucial requirement for a standard language" (Haugen in Am Anthropol 68:922-935, 1966a; Haugen, in: Bright (ed)…

Based on Mahboob and Elyas (World Engl 33(1):128-142, 2014), who identified an expanding circle variety of Englishes, known as 'Saudi English', the present paper addresses the consonantal variations between Formal English and a sub-variety of Saudi English, termed as 'Saudi Hijazi English'. The paper presents the specific consonants of Saudi…

In this paper, the author argues that the theoretical groundings of code-switching are flawed, in that they rely on a flawed understanding of language. For code-switching to function as described by sociologists and educators, language would have to be a skill--and particular languages and dialects to be discrete subsets of this skill--to be…

Purpose: Unlike formalist and functional approaches to literacy and teaching writing, a languaging theory approach centers on the dynamic and interpersonal nature of writing. The purpose of this study was to determine students' ability to engage in explicit reflection about their languaging actions in response to their personal narrative writing…

The traditional Philadelphia allophonic /ae/ system (henceforth: PHL shown in (1) below) is characterized by a set of complicated conditioning factors and a dramatic acoustic distinction between the two allophones. In recent years, some Philadelphians have begun to exhibit a new allophonic system (NAS, shown in (2) below). Like PHL, NAS is…

Evidentiality is commonly concerned with two basic notions: evidence type and the speaker's commitment towards the truth of the proposition expressed (Chafe and Nichols 1986). Throughout a detailed study of the morphosyntax and semantics of deverbal agentives (DAs), this dissertation investigates indirect evidentiality and its interaction with two…

Final obstruent devoicing is attested in both Middle and Modern High German, and the modern rule is usually assumed to have been directly inherited from the medieval rule without any chronological break (Reichmann & Wegera 1993), despite the fact that the graphic representation of final devoicing ceased in the Early Modern period. However, an…

The core objective of this study was to examine whether acoustic variability of vowel production in American English, across speaking tasks, is systematic. Ten male speakers who spoke a relatively homogeneous Wisconsin dialect produced eight monophthong vowels (in hVd and CVC contexts) in four speaking tasks, including clear-speech, citation form,…