世新大學圖書館

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 60-09, Section: A, page: 3339.

Supervisors: Keith Walters; Peter Abboud.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Texas at Austin, 1999.

The goal of this dissertation is to describe the nature of syntactic constraints on intra-sentential diglossic switching between the High and the Low varieties of Arabic (Ferguson 1959) in light of Myers-Scotton's Matrix Language Frame model (Myers-Scotton 1993a, Myers-Scotton and Jake in press), likely the most promising model of syntactic constraints on codeswitching to date, using a corpus of public political speeches delivered between 1956 and 1968 by Habib Bourguiba, the first president of Tunisia.

Although there has long been interest in the nature of the ‘intermediate’ varieties of the Arabic language, i.e. those involving some mixture of Classical Arabic (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), its modern version, on the one hand, and national dialects, on the other, research on these varieties has generally been limited to describing the linguistic features of a so-called ‘third’ language. Absent, however, has been any effort to analyse these varieties as codeswitching, i.e. switching between fus&dotbelow;h&dotbelow;aa (CA/MSA) and the dialect or to relate issues of variability in these ‘intermediate’ varieties to theoretical models of switching. Following Walters (1996), I contend that what is called the ‘third’ language is in fact ‘diglossic switching’ and that there is no variety conventionalised as the ‘third’ language. Rather, what is being conventionalised are patterns of switching between the two varieties with the dialect as the matrix variety into which constituents from fus&dotbelow;h&dotbelow;aa are embedded. Thus, the present study considers diglossia to be the case of prolonged contact between historically related varieties that are linguistically constrained and socially motivated like any other type of codeswitching.

The application of the MLF to a diglossic situation poses some potential problematic cases to the model. The first problem relates to clashes in subcategorisation restrictions, the second involves clashes in word order between the dialect and fus&dotbelow;h&dotbelow;aa. The third problem involves the co-occurrence of system morphemes from both varieties.

Although these cases seem problematic at first glance, at least two of them can be resolved in a principled manner within Myers-Scotton's framework. Thus, this research represents a significant effort to refine the ways in which the current linguistic reality of Arabic-speaking communities has been described.

School code: 0227.