Linguistics

The Old English verb ‘beon’ and the present-day English verb ‘be’ share the same morphological properties and verbal qualities, and the change from one form to the other can be traced throughout the history of English. I will give a brief overview of OE verb classes, then show how suppletion helped form 'beon's paradigm, and, lastly, document the change from 'beon' to 'be'

The flâneur, a concept coined by Walter Benjamin, has been addressed in literary studies, as well as other academic disciplines. For example, E.A. Poe’s short story “The Man in the Crowd” deals with the notion of flâneuring, and a great number of Paul Auster’s work address the act of walking and experiencing one’s environment, flâneuring being one of the modes the characters choose.

The concept of the flâneur is, however, a strictly aesthetic, i.e. visual one. The other senses are disregarded in such a way that people with disabilities, especially blind people, are almost completely excluded from the definition of the flâneur. While it may be true that a blind person does not share the same visual experience as a sighted person, they usually have the same set of senses apart from seeing.

The aim of this paper is to move the focus from the visual impressions that occur when walking through urban areas to the audible impressions. In the first section, I will give a short overview and definition of the concept of flânerie. Then, I will outline the differences between the blind and sighted style of navigation, focused on hearing, featuring my own experiences of “hearing the city”. In the third section, I will attempt to draw parallels between the blind and sighted style of hearing while moving through the city, and the act of flâneuring.

The present master's thesis aims to make a contribution to the study of a Moroccan-Arabic dialect belonging to the oldest linguistic layer of Maghrebian dialects. The Arabic of Chefchaouen is an archaic prehilalian urban dialect and thus dates back to the first wave of Arabization in Morocco (7th to 11th century). For its conservative features the dialect is considered very valuable for Maghrebian dialectology. In spring 2015 Dr. Aicha Rahmouni made audio recordings of approximately 70-year-old men and women from Chefchaouen reciting culinaric topics. Afterwards these recordings were transcribed and translated into German for the present study. Thus a text corpus about traditional dishes of the city of Chefchaouen and its surrounding region was formed. Before-hand is a short dialect study in which the main features of the dialect are discussed. Etymological and lexical characteristics of the dialect are commented in the attached glossary of chefchaouen-arabic terms. The main goa...

This paper presents the transcription and translation of a recording made 2016 during fieldwork in the city of Ḥamīdiyya, in Khuzestan, located about 25 km to the northwest of the region's capital city Aḥwāz. The text is introduced by a brief discussion of some of the characteristic phonological, morphological and lexical features of Khuzestani Arabic in general, and some peculiarities of the Ḥamīdiyya dialect in particular. Language contact with the country's official language, Persian, of course is also significant, but will not be the focus of this discussion.

Khuzestan Arabic is an Arabic variety spoken in the southwestern Iranian province of Khuzestan. It has been in contact with (Modern) Persian since the arrival of Arab tribes in the region before the rise of Islam. Persian is the socio-politically dominant language in the modern state of Iran and has influenced the grammar of Khuzestan Arabic on different levels. The present article discusses phenomena of contact-induced change in Khuzestan Arabic and considers their limiting factors.

This paper discusses the reflection of the social roles of women and men in Arabic vernacular proverbs and idioms used in the town of al-Guṣba (Southern Iran). Recurrent topics and concepts associated with certain gender roles found in these proverbs and idioms are honor, family (duties) and children, sterility, polygyny, and divorce. The analysis of attitudes towards females and males as reflected in the language data analyzed are useful for social and cultural anthropologists interested in Southern Iranian Arab communities and the situation of women in these societies as well as for Arabic dialectologists and sociolinguists interested in the linguistic properties of Arabic vernacular proverbs and idioms. The main part of the analysis is preceded by a short chapter on the Arabic dialect of al-Guṣba and linguistic and stylistic notes on the analyzed proverbs and idioms. The examples of proverbs and idioms are all provided with glosses and shall serve as useful material for further general linguistic analysis for both Arabic dialectologists and linguists.

The primary aim of this paper is to explore the functions of the word /fard/ in Iraqi and Khuzestani Arabic. The study is based on the analysis of various text corpora and the elicitation of further examples from native speakers of the varieties investigated. The analysis of these data has shown that /fard/ is a polyfunctional item. Its various functions are the result of several grammaticalization processes. In the first stage, the noun "individual" has become a quantifier that expresses singularity. From this stage it developed into an intensifier, a marker of approximation and the scalar adverb "only." It has been demonstrated that, from its use as a presentative marker, it developed toward an indefinite article. In contrast to the definite article, which is a grammatical category in nearly every variety of Arabic, the use of an indefinite article is rarely found in spoken Arabic. In Iraqi and Khuzestani Arabic, /fard/ is an indefinite article that possesses a wide range of applications and only a limited set of constraints. Its use, however, remains optional to a very high degree. Its main function is that of a presentativei.e., introducing a new referent into a discourse. In addition, it also functions as an individuation marker, as a marker for expressing the speaker's epistemic status (knowledge/ignorance) regarding a referent, and indicating free choice from a set of potential referents. Related to this last function is its use as a mitigating device in imperatives and polite requests.

This paper presents the transcription and translation of a recording made during fieldwork in the city of Ah wa z, Khuzestan, with a female elderly speaker who was born and raised in Hoveyzeh, a town located about 25 km to the north-west of Ah wa z, and some of her (female) family members. It is the first published text of a recording of a marshland dialect.
The text itself is preceded by a brief description of marshland Arabic features according to their appearance in the text and a discussion of the diminutive in this Arabic variety based on the speaker’s abundant use of diminutives in this text.

This paper attempts to show the emergence of current language processing models as a result of interdisciplinary research. This interdisciplinarity is already evident from the job titles of the researchers at the centre of attention: they were neuro-, psycho-, biolinguists and initially physicians and psychiatrists who dealt with the mapping of language-specific processes in the brains of humans and primates. It was only through collaboration with clinicians that linguists gained access to the modern and elaborate measuring equipment that enabled them to collect the necessary data that ultimately led them to the current language processing models.