Idiomaticity, lexical realignment, and semantic change in spoken Arabic

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jonathan Owens
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2011 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 196684380

The project uses qualitative and quantiative methods to investigate the role of idiomaticity in language change. Initial results already based on extensive corpus-based and comparative qualitative data, indicate that in the course of its 600-year split from Egyptian Arabic, Nigerian Arabic has undergone considerable change. Using the word for head as the basis of comparison, both the semantics, the sense taxonomy of head, and the collocational distribution of head vis a vis other words has changed remarkably. It furthermore has been shown that commensurate with its divergence from Egyptian Arabic, Nigerian Arabic idiomaticity has shown a considerable convergence towards the dominant language in the region, Kanuri, with which it has been in contact for its entire history in the region.The second phase of the project will extend this research using a much larger data base. This will consist on the one hand of two comparative corpora, 400,000 words of spoken Nigerian Arabic and nearly 500,000 words of spoken Egyptian Arabic. These two corpora will be used to investigate the degree to which the selected idioms differ between the two areas in terms of their collocational environment. The corpora further will be used, along with intensive work with informants, to study the different meanings which identical idiomatic keywords, like head, have in the dialects. At least twelve keywords, occurring in well over 200 idioms per dialect, will be described in terms of their semantics, and in terms of their quantitatively-defined properties. The semantic description will be embedded in standard categories of cognitive linguistics (polysemy, metaphor, metonymy), while the quantitative comparison will employ simple frequency comparison as well as more sophisticated multivariate analyses to compare the varieties. In the case of Nigerian Arabic, detailed semantic comparison with Kanuri will address the question of the extent to which contact did indeed bring about the observed changes, while a further, smaller comparison will be made with another language of the area, Glavda, in order to gauge the degree to which Nigerian Arabic partakes of a broad areal semantic phenomenon.Given the electronic copora, the ability to process and categorize large amounts of data necessary for the quantitative comparison has been greatly facilitated by a Morphological Segmenter built in conjunctive with the Angewandte Informatik of Bayreuth University.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Participating Person: Professor Dr. Manfred Woidich