Jordanian Arabic | Conclusions

General Considerations

Due to the nature of our corpus being a public art project, there are a few aspects we should take into consideration that may have effected the research. Despite these, I, as a researcher, felt that the legitimacy of the corpus being native speakers outweighed the few facets we must consider that may have skewed the research.

First, the fact that the speakers were speaking to someone who was interviewing them may have influences their natural speaking tendencies. The interviewer would probably have informed the speakers that their words would be recorded and their picture would be taken to accompany their story and shared on the internet. These circumstances may have influenced some speakers to speak slightly more formally and therefore slightly more in tune with Modern Standard Arabic rather than dialect.

Secondly, these were interviews that were done orally and then transcribed by a listener. With that, there could have been some changes done, either consciously or unconsciously, by the transcriber. The transcriber could have a tendency to write things in a more MSA register, due to the fact that MSA is usually the written language and dialect only spoken and less normally written. Also, the transcriber may have attempted to transcribe accurately but things could easily slip through the cracks and they may have changed a bit of the words as they thought they were said rather than how actually said.

Gender

My hypothesis for gender held up as I imagined it would. The speakers made very few gender agreement mistakes and the few that we did look at were easily explained and understandable.

From this study we can conclude that native Arabic speakers make few gender agreement errors. It’s a bit difficult to imagine since gender agreement doesn’t really exist in English but it makes sense in Arabic that speakers would obey the rules because it’s such an ingrained part of the language that it becomes natural to use gender agreement.

Prepositions

My original hypothesis for elision in regards to prepositions was that it would occur more often than not but the data concluded otherwise. I originally thought it would be more often the case because exhibiting elision because, phonologically, it is just a simpler and faster way to use the language that is still understood.

However, perhaps I was just wrong to assume speakers would default to an easier pronunciation and this was my own personal preference rather than a correct assessment.

Verbs

My hypothesis on verbs mostly held up as well, however due to the vast size and complicated nature of the data for verbs, it’s hard to categorize them all into one. My hypothesis for plain verbs was about what was to be expected with there being about a third of plain verbs using the morphological 'b' prefix although I may have guessed this number to be a bit higher.

For the rest of the verbs, I got about what I expected with a few unexpected variations.

Overall, there was very few cases of the prefix being used in one the categories that came after a verb/tense marker. However for the marker 3m, which is a marker that turns the proceeding verb into an -ing verb, there was almost equal amounts prefixes as non prefixes. This wasn’t expected but it’s understandable as it’s a very unique sort of marker and the tendency to use it to create an -ing verb might not automatically detract from the emphasis the b prefix would put on the following verb.

As for the rest, future and participle received absolutely no prefixes and negation received the most out of the rest. However, none of these numbers are out of the expected range. However, other than the plain verbs, the rest of the data for verbs was relatively low so it would be interesting to see how it would shift if we were to add more excerpts and reanalyze the data.