Idiomaticity, lexical realignment, and semantic change in spoken Arabic
Final Report Abstract
The goal of this project was three-fold. First, descriptive and comparative research was conducted on two varieties of Arabic, Nigerian Arabic (NA) and Egyptian Arabic (EA) in a domain of research, semantics, which has tended to be neglected in Arabic Linguistics. Secondly, an empirical basis was established by developing a searchable, online corpus of oral NA texts. Thirdly, a perceived bias within Linguistics itself in which research on idioms has tended to be subordinated to the theory of metonymy and metaphor was redressed with a focus on idiomaticity as an independent variable. The basis of the project were two large corpora of spoken Arabic, Egyptian and Nigerian, each consisting of something in the range of 400,000 words. The choice of these two dialects was motivated by the fact that ancestral NA stems from Upper Egypt, the split having occurred between 1200-1400. As the Nigerian Arabic data had not yet been made available to the public, one significant aspect of the project was to build an online platform where the NA texts can be accessed, both sound and transcription. From the corpora a number of high frequency key words such as "galb" ‘heart’ and "raas" ‘head’ were studied, which more often than not have an idiomatic meaning in both varieties of Arabic. “galb” in NA, for instance, occurs in 101 tokens, none of which are a literal ‘heart’. A typical usage is idiomatic, such as "tallaf galb-I" ‘he angered me’, lit. ‘he spoiled my heart’. Whereas in both EA and NA the selected key words are highly idiomatic, they are so in different ways, i.e. in their meanings and in the lexical collocations which support the meanings. Though rather frequent in NA, an idiom such as "tallaf galb-I" is a nonsense collocation in EA. In fact, on the basis of the large (in token terms) sample, it was found that NA idioms are fundamentally different from EA idioms. This was demonstrated in two ways. On the one hand, NA has massively calqued its idiomatic collocational structure from the dominant Kanuri. On the other hand, EA shows a remarkable identity in terms of meaning and collocational environment with southern Tunisian Arabic, a variety which split from EA some 1,000 years ago. The identities between STA and EA are interpreted as retentions, the differences in NA due to shift via contact with Kanuri. Whereas the project was originally conceived on a comparative, historical linguistic basis (EA vs. NA), it became apparent that idiomaticity itself as a theoretical construct needed contextualization. The Cognitive Linguistic tradition largely instrumentalized idioms to serve metaphor theory. While the psycholinguistic tradition usefully pushed back against the reification of metaphor, appealing to idioms in the process, it did little to consider the nature of idioms themselves. Accordingly, a model of idiom structure was developped around their lexical nature. In this model, an idiomatic key word such as "galb" ‘heart’ is defined by three properties: an attribute extension hierarchy which defines the core meaning(s) of the key word, an idiomatic stipulation that specifies the keyword is idiomatic only in the context of certain collocates, and distributed polysemy, which accounts for the effect of a larger syntactic context in defining contrastive idiomatic meanings. What follows from these properties is a fundamental distinction between literal and idiomatic meanings of one and the same lexeme, such as "galb" ‘heart’. With corpus help, idiomaticity emerges as a composite linguistic construct whose elements can reveal significant patterns of diachronic change, and stability. Research continues in its documentation, descriptive, historical and theoretical dimensions.
Publications
- 2014. Many heads are better than one: The spread of motivated opacity via contact. Linguistics 52, 125-65
Owens, J.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2013-0058) - 2015. Idioms, polysemy, context: A model based on Nigerian Arabic. Anthropological Linguistics. 57, 46-98
Owens, J.
- 2016. The lexical nature of idioms. Language Sciences Volume 57, September 2016, Pages 49-69
Owens, J.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2016.05.004) - Semantic mapping: What happens to idioms in discourse. Linguistics, Band 55, Heft 3, S. 641–682, 2017
Owens J. and Robin Dodsworth
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2017-0007) - Three idioms, three dialects, one history: Egyptian, Nigerian and Tunisian Arabic. S. 43-84 in: Tunisian and Libyan Arabic Dialects: Common Trends - Recent Developments - Diachronic Aspects. Ritt-Benmimoun, Veronika (ed.), Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 26.05.2017
Ritt-Benmimoun, Smaranda Grigore, Jocelyne Owens and Jonathan Owens
