Studies in Contrastive Linguistics and Stylistics 1634856600, 9781634856607

Citation preview

LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS

STUDIES IN CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS AND STYLISTICS

No part of this digital document may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means. The publisher has taken reasonable care in the preparation of this digital document, but makes no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assumes no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of information contained herein. This digital document is sold with the clear understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, medical or any other professional services.

LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS Additional books in this series can be found on Nova’s website under the Series tab. Additional e-books in this series can be found on Nova’s website under the e-books tab.

LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS

STUDIES IN CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS AND STYLISTICS

AMR M. EL-ZAWAWY, PhD

New York

Copyright © 2016 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means: electronic, electrostatic, magnetic, tape, mechanical photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the Publisher. We have partnered with Copyright Clearance Center to make it easy for you to obtain permissions to reuse content from this publication. Simply navigate to this publication’s page on Nova’s website and locate the “Get Permission” button below the title description. This button is linked directly to the title’s permission page on copyright.com. Alternatively, you can visit copyright.com and search by title, ISBN, or ISSN. For further questions about using the service on copyright.com, please contact: Copyright Clearance Center Phone: +1-(978) 750-8400 Fax: +1-(978) 750-4470 E-mail: [email protected].

NOTICE TO THE READER The Publisher has taken reasonable care in the preparation of this book, but makes no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assumes no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of information contained in this book. The Publisher shall not be liable for any special, consequential, or exemplary damages resulting, in whole or in part, from the readers’ use of, or reliance upon, this material. Any parts of this book based on government reports are so indicated and copyright is claimed for those parts to the extent applicable to compilations of such works. Independent verification should be sought for any data, advice or recommendations contained in this book. In addition, no responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property arising from any methods, products, instructions, ideas or otherwise contained in this publication. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject matter covered herein. It is sold with the clear understanding that the Publisher is not engaged in rendering legal or any other professional services. If legal or any other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent person should be sought. FROM A DECLARATION OF PARTICIPANTS JOINTLY ADOPTED BY A COMMITTEE OF THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION AND A COMMITTEE OF PUBLISHERS. Additional color graphics may be available in the e-book version of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN: 978-1-63485-660-7 (e-book)

Published by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. † New York

CONTENTS List of Figures

vii

List of Tables

ix

Preface

xi

Part One: Contrastive Linguistics

1

Chapter 1

The Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis

3

Chapter 2

English and Arabic Phonology

7

Chapter 3

Word-Formation in English and Arabic: Derivation and Compounding

15

Chapter 4

Loanwords in English and Arabic

21

Chapter 5

Passivization in English and Arabic

31

Chapter 6

Synonymy in English and Arabic

41

Chapter 7

Idioms in English and Arabic

49

Chapter 8

Cohesion and Coherence in English and Arabic

55

Part Two: Stylistics Chapter 9 Chapter 10

79

Al-Ma’arri and Herbert: A Dehistoricized Hermeneutical Approach

81

Introducing the Stylistic Notions Overtones and Undertones 1: Nazik Al-Malai’ka’s Poetry

89

vi Chapter 11 Chapter 12

Contents Poetic Persona and Overtones in Abul-Qasim Al-Shaby’s Poetry The Stylistics of W.B. Yeats’s Poetry

99 109

Glossary of Recurrent Terms

117

Bibliography

119

Author's Contact Information

127

Index

129

LIST OF FIGURES Figure 5-1. A conventional tree diagram for an active structure. Figure 5-2. A conventional tree diagram for a passive structure. Figure 8-1. Knott‘s ‘text spans.’ Figure 8-2. A semantic network after de Beaugrande and Dressler (1981)

32 33 56 66

LIST OF TABLES Table 2-1. English consonants with voicing, manner and place of articulation Table 2-2. Arabic consonants, with manner, place and voicing

8 9

PREFACE This collection of studies is not intended to overturn any theory either in contrastive linguistics or in stylistics. It is not theoretically groundbreaking, so to speak. The present book is an arduous attempt at filling a gap clearly recognized in both fields of contrastive linguistics and stylistics, and at bringing the two seemingly discrete disciplines together. Contrastive linguistics, especially when comparisons are drawn between two languages from distant linguistic families such as Arabic and English, is suffering from a lack of studies that pinpoint specific differences that otherwise are relegated to footnotes or endnotes in books of semantics or error analysis. This marked deficiency leaves the Arab learner all the more baffled, and may at times oblige him to have recourse to references that are highly steeped in theoretical issues. The Arab learner is thus required to read several chapters from separate books in order to acquire the knowledge necessary to embark on valid comparisons between his/her mother tongue and the English language. The difficulties encountered by the Arab learner, who usually has to brush up his/her Arabic in the process, are compounded by the fact that his/her English is not up to scratch. In a sense, if comparisons are ever to be held, they should be first based on solid linguistic knowledge of the two languages at issue. I have encountered this obstacle both as an erstwhile student of linguistics and as a lecturer of linguistics and translation for a dozen of years now. I have also included some studies on stylistics. They draw on comparisons between Arabic and English poetry as a continuation of the contrastive method adopted in the first part on contrastive linguistics. The stylistics part is mainly derived from my knowledge of Arabic and English poetry, but also follows a

xii

Amr M. El-Zawawy

linguistic avenue. This part was authored many years ago, unlike the contrastive linguistics part, which grew out of my recent insights and extensive readings. I do not claim that the book is expressly intended for linguists or the literati: it can also be put to use as a teaching manual of contrastive linguistics and/or a concrete example of how stylistics can contribute to the linguistic analysis of poetry. What urged me to sit down and write this rather short book is the paucity of the research that tangentially touches upon contrastive linguistics between English and Arabic on the one hand, and the modicum of studies done in the field of comparative stylistics on the other. Nor is the book a shot at unexceptionable insights or a compendium of all and everything. It is a starter. I would like to thank Professor Jeffrey Marck of the Australian National University for proofreading the manuscript of the book, and for providing valuable insights. I admit hereupon that my attempt is far from being meritorious: it may be meretriciously praised by some later on, but I admit that all mistakes and mishaps are mine notwithstanding. Amr El-Zawawy Alexandria, Egypt

PART ONE: CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS

Chapter 1

THE CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS HYPOTHESIS CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS AND CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS Contrastive linguistics is a branch of contrastive analysis, which includes error analysis as well. It is mainly concerned with the differences (and sometimes the similarities) between two languages or more in terms of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics in addition to any other linguistic nuances. The question that needs to be posed, however, is whether contrastive linguistics is essential. According to Selinker (1981), English is the language that is contrasted in most cases, with the aim of improving language teaching. This claim has previously been considered subject to doubt by several scholars such as Corder (1967), Alatis (1968) and James (1968). They call for the ‘revitalization’ of contrastive linguistics within an empirical framework. Viewed with respect to time, ‘revitalization’ was cast in the mold of generative grammar. Thus, teachers are expected to use generative grammar to provide insights into the nature of language and its structure. In a sense, contrastive linguistics is not about what should be taught, but what it is that they are actually teaching. Selinker (1981) considers the task of contrastive linguistics as centered around two methods. The first is based on choosing aspects of language and searching for essential notions in them. However, the problem with this approach is that many linguistic notions are yet to be verified. This leads to the second method, regarding relevant data on certain theoretical issues and discussing them in a contrastive framework. This trend has the advantage of enriching contrastive studies with theoretical notions that can be validated according to tangible findings.

4

Amr M. El-Zawawy

As for contrastive analysis (henceforth CA), some scholars take it to be a field that lacks a solid basis. Abbas (1995) sees CA as suffering from a basic weakness, i.e., its overwhelming emphasis on one type of error, especially “interference.” In particular cases, CA fails to justify an error. Klein (1986) provides a good example of Turkish, Spanish and Italian students learning German. Following the grammatical structure of their native language, Turkish students often place the verb into the final position. On the other hand, Spanish and Italian learners do the same, although verbs are not in final positions in their own languages. It is clear that interference of a learner’s L1 is not the only factor here. As a reaction to this type of criticism, Error Analysis (henceforth EA) was often suggested as an alternative but lies outside the scope of the present book.

THE CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS HYPOTHESIS Klein (1986) distinguishes between two hypotheses for second language acquisition: the identity hypothesis and the contrastive hypothesis. The identity hypothesis centers around the assumption that the acquisition of one language has little or no bearing on the acquisition of another. The contrastive hypothesis, on the other hand, is based on the idea that the structure of the first language influences the acquisition of the second language. This hypothesis is particularly related to the theory and practice of contrastive analysis; hence the contrastive analysis hypothesis.

THE PROCEDURES OF THE CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS HYPOTHESIS To carry out a contrastive analysis, Whitman (1970) proposes four steps: 1. Writing formal descriptions of any two languages under investigation. 2. Determining points of contrast. 3. Contrasting the points selected. 4. Predicting sources of difficulty through contrast. The ‘points’ spoken of may be referred to as ‘forms,’ i.e., linguistic units of any size. The procedures mentioned can be further explained through the

The Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis

5

notion of a hierarchy of difficulty as proposed by Stockwell et al. (1965). This hierarchy assumes three types of transfer: positive, negative and zero. When the structures of two languages are similar, positive transfer will occur; when they are different, negative transfer will occur; and when they are unrelated, zero transfer obtains. Wardhaugh (1970, 124), however, states that the hypothesis can be classified into two versions: strong and weak. The strong version predicted that the majority of L2 errors were due to negative transfer. The weak version, on the other hand, merely explained errors after they were made.

EVALUATING THE CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS HYPOTHESIS Pros The contrastive analysis hypothesis is grounded on the idea that it offers predictions about errors. The procedures of finding points of contrast and predicting sources of difficulty accord well with the real teaching situation. For example, Arab learners tend to substitute /b/ for /p/ due to the absence of /p/ in standard Arabic. /f/ and /v/ pose difficulties along similar lines. Besides linguistic internalization, learners need to be aware of the sources of difficulty and their reasons.

Cons The contrastive analysis hypothesis invited several areas of criticisms. It is intrinsically built upon Structuralism, which lost gloss with the advent of Innateness. Thus, the assumption of mentalism did not find a palpable position in the contrastive analysis hypothesis, which blatantly ignored it. Moreover, Hughes (1980) argues that the contrastive analysis hypothesis failed due to a number of considerations it lacked, namely the learner, what has to be learned and the way of learning. Clearly, the first factor is germane to Innateness, where the LAD plays a major role. The second factor is related to the content presented to the learner. The contrastive analysis hypothesis focused on the description of any two languages, but current linguistic investigation may lack sufficient and complete data for an adequate study of language. The way the data are presented is also not taken into consideration and this is clear in the mechanical procedures adopted by the contrastive analysis hypothesis.

6

Amr M. El-Zawawy

Wardhaugh (1970) points out that the contrastive analysis hypothesis was also criticized on the grounds that it could not take into account relative difficulty among L2 segments that shared the property of being different from the L1. In their 1970 study, Oller and Ziahosseiny (184) proposed a moderate version of the contrastive analysis hypothesis to explain the hierarchy of difficulty. They conducted a study which was based on English spelling errors on the UCLA placement test. Spelling errors of foreign students whose native language employed a Roman alphabet were compared with spelling errors of foreign students whose native language had little or no relation to such an alphabet. Other strictures that can be aimed at the contrastive analysis hypothesis include the following (based on Byung-gon 1992): 1. The interference from L1 is not the only cause of the error: ignorance may be the real reason. 2. The contrastive analysis hypothesis assumes that interference operates from L1 to L2, while there are cases where the opposite might be true, e.g., Arab native speakers failing to pronounce a satisfactory ‫ ﺽ‬/d/ in Arabic. 3. Some errors predicated by the contrastive analysis hypothesis never occur.

CONCLUSION It can be concluded that the contrastive analysis hypothesis used to be a viable tool for comparing and contrasting a pair of languages or more. Yet it remains arguable whether it can be amended in order to accommodate the advances made in linguistic inquiry. The Chomskyan tradition has been challenged over the past three decades more than once with several penetrating criticisms that at times left the theory untenable. It is also clear that the method of setting the phonological systems, the syntactic structure and the semantics of one language next to those of another language is still in use in many classes of linguistics and translation. However, the idea of error analysis has proved that it is not always interference that causes the errors committed by second language and/or foreign language learners while speaking and writing. Perhaps a new contrastive analysis hypothesis needs to be formulated.

Chapter 2

ENGLISH AND ARABIC PHONOLOGY INTRODUCTION This chapter outlines the phonological systems of both English and Arabic. It offers an introduction to the two systems with their basic sounds, and provides point-by-point differences between the two systems in terms of consonants, vowels (including diphthongs), and stress patterns.

CONSONANTS Consonants are traditionally defined as the speech sounds where there is a certain obstruction of the air stream coming from the lungs. This obstruction may be complete or partial. Complete obstruction is exemplified by what happens in the case of plosives, where the air is obstructed at the lips (e.g., /p/, /b/) then suddenly released. Partial obstruction is exemplified by friction, since the air stream is released only after some friction happens at the lips or farther back in the oral cavity. This process is universal: all languages possess consonants. English and Arabic are no exception. However, it is important to review English and Arabic consonants before contrasting the two languages.

English Consonants English consonants are typically described according to manner of articulation, place of production and voicing. It is of note that the name of the manner of articulation refers to the place of articulation: if a consonant is nasal, then this may indicate that the obstruction of the air is somewhat

8

Amr M. El-Zawawy

managed at the nasal cavity. Yet my table which I propose hereunder is essential to provide another table where the manner and place of articulation are accurately indicated: Table 2-1. English consonants with voicing, manner and place of articulation Bilabial Stops Fricatives Affricates

Voiceless Voiced Voiceless Voiced Voiceless Voiced

Nasals Laterals Semi-vowles (or off-glides)

Labiodental

Interdental

p b f v

θ ð

Apicoalveolar t d s z

m w

l r

Laminopalatal

Velar

Glottal

k g ∫ ʒ t∫ d

h

ŋ

j

Apart from the sounds which do not occur in Arabic, the table also includes voicing, i.e., whether the sound initiates vibration of the vocal cords or not. Thus, /b/ is voiced, since it causes vibration of the vocal folds, while /p/ is voiceless, since it does not.

Syllabic Consonants This is an area where a word of caution is in demand. Syllabic consonants are a special case in English, where consonants act as vowels thus forming syllables. The consonants in English that are allowed to form syllables are /n/, /m/, and /l/. They are always preceded by vowels, which are then dropped, leaving the consonant to act as a consonant-cum-vowel inside the syllable. Examples of syllabic consonants include: ‘bitten’ [ˈbɪtnˌ], ‘rhythm’ [ˈrɪðmˌ] and ‘police’ [pˈlˌiːs], where these words have two syllables intact.

Arabic Consonants The same identification of manner, place and voicing can be fairly applied to Arabic consonants. The following table summarizes the consonants of Arabic:

Table 2-2. Arabic consonants, with manner, place and voicing Bilabial Stops

Voiceless

Nasals Laterals Semi-vowles (or off-glides)

Voiceless Voiced

Dental (dark) t, t d

b f

Voiced

Affricates

Interdental

Voiceless

Voiced Fricatives

Labiodental

m

w

θ, (dark) θ ð, (dark) ð

Lamino- Uvular Velar palatal t, q k

Glottal

g

s, (dark)s

∫

x

z

ʒ

ġ

dʒ l, (dark)I j

h

‘

’

10

Amr M. El-Zawawy

It is noteworthy that the ‘dark’ sounds exist in Arabic but are lacking in English, much in the same way as the table above has English sounds that do not exist in Arabic. But before embarking on the contrastive study of the consonants of both languages, a number of points, advanced by Watson (2002), should be taken into consideration. These points pertain to the differences that can be observed according to the intra-Arabic phonological system, where certain consonants, though institutionalized, are somewhat variable: 1. /q/ voiceless uvular stop. Restricted to religious and Standard Arabic lexemes, e.g., il-qur’an ‘the Qur’an,’ il-alqahira ‘Cairo’; 2. /r/ pharyngealized dental–alveolar tap (emphatic counterpart of /r/). Found predominantlyin European loans and in native words with guttural vowels, e.g., baraʃutt. 3. /b/ pharyngealized bilabial stop (emphatic counterpart of /b/). A clear example is: baba ‘pope.’ 4. /m/ pharyngealized bilabial nasal stop (emphatic counterpart of /m/). An example is: mayyiti ‘my water.’ 5. /l/ pharyngealized lateral (emphatic counterpart of /l/). It is similar to dark /l/ in English, but it follows the rule of velarizing the word ‘Allah’ without a preceding preposition. 6. /p/ voiceless bilabial stop. Found in a few loan words among educated speakers, e.g., Paris ‘Paris.’ 7. /ʒ/ voiced palate-alveolar fricative. Found in a few loan words, e.g., ʒakitta ‘jacket,’ biʒama ‘pair of pajamas.’ 8. /v/ voiced labio-dental fricative. Found in a few loan words among educated speakers, e.g., villa ‘villa.’ However, most aging Arabs find it very difficult to produce a satisfactory /v/, and usually replace it with /f/.

VOWELS English Vowels The term ‘vowels’ will be applied to both vowels and diphthongs for two reasons. First, diphthongs are traditionally viewed as composed of two vowels. Second, Arabic has very few or no diphthongs according to some accounts, and this will make the contrast between the two languages easier.

English and Arabic Phonology

11

English has twelve vowels, and they are all produced without any obstruction of the air stream. Vowels are typically described according to their place of articulation inside the oral cavity in addition to the movement of the tongue to close or open the mouth. The lips are usually relaxed and play no significant role in the production process. The features ‘close,’ ‘close-mid’ and the like are the result of the movement of the tongue up and down in the oral cavity. Thus, the vowel /i/ is produced front in the mouth with the tongue very close to the upper teeth. The most troublesome of all the English vowels is the schwa /ə/, having no systematic spelling, and being able to replace any of the eleven remaining vowels in rapid, casual speech. English has eight diphthongs: /ei/, /ai/, /au/, /ɔɪ/, /əʊ/, /ʊə/, /ɪə/, /eə/. They can be said to have endings that help classify them. Thus, three diphthongs end in /i/, two in /u/, and three in /ə/.

Arabic Vowels In much the same way, the term ‘vowels’ will be applied to both vowels and diphthongs. Watson (2002) notes that Standard Arabic had three short vowel phonemes: two close vowels, palatal *I and labio-velar *u, and one open vowel. As for short vowels, she sees the opposition between /i/ and /u/ as existing in all dialects in the long vowels. All modern dialects of Arabic have at least three long vowels, /ã/, /ï/, and /ü/. / ï / and / ü/ have an articulation which is closer than that of their short counterparts, and / ã/ has a front articulation. The dialects also have diphthongs derived historically from diphthongs. The diphthongs are *ay and *aw, which coalesced historically in dialects such as Cairene, Central Sudanese (Hamid 1984, 27–8), and those spoken in much of the Levant, to be realized as /ē/ and /ō/.

STRESS PLACEMENT English Stress English stress is centered on the idea of light and heavy syllables. Light syllables possess short vowels or the schwa, while heavy syllables typically

12

Amr M. El-Zawawy

have long vowels, diphthongs and/or more than one consonant at the end. This very broad observation has exceptions that endanger its applicability across a wide range of cases. For example, the word ‘borrow’ has a diphthong in the second syllable, but stress is not placed on it. Sometimes the word includes two short vowels, and the choice becomes much harder, e.g., ‘engine.’ Moreover, certain morphemes greatly affect stress placement, and even carry exceptions within. For example, ‘-graphy’ and ‘-tion’ are said to change stress placement in ‘photography’ and ‘relaxation,’ since ‘photo’ alone carries stress on the first syllable, while ‘photography’ has stress placed on the second syllable. Yet a word such as ‘exception’ has stress placed on the second syllable, and ‘except’ also has stress placed on the second syllable, thus nullifying the influence of the morpheme ‘-tion.’ Stress in English is a major source of difficulty even for native speakers, who sometimes assign the same word two acceptable stress patterns, e.g., ‘controversy.’

Arabic stress The Defense Language Institute Manual (1974) provides general rules for stress in Arabic as follows: 1. The last syllable in an Arabic word is never stressed. 2. Heavy syllables usually receive stress, and light syllables never do. 3. Any suffixes typically change stress patterns. However, Watson (2002) provides a much more elaborate picture. She particularly focuses on Cairene Arabic stress. She arrives at the following rules: (a) Stress a final superheavy or CVV syllable: Kã’tabt ‘I wrote’ Fala’hïn ‘peasants’ Ki’tãb ‘book’ (b) Otherwise stress a penultimate heavy (CVC or CVV) syllable: ‘bētak ‘your m.s. house’ ‘bintik ‘your daughter’ Dar’rasni ‘he taught me’

English and Arabic Phonology

13

Mu’darris ‘teacher’ Yikal’limhum ‘he speaks to them’ (c) Otherwise stress the penultimate or antepenultimate syllable, whichever is separated by an even number of syllables from the closest preceding heavy syllable (A), or—if there is no such syllable—from the beginning of the word (B):

ii. Penultimate stress (a) mudar’risa ‘teacher f.’ Madr’asa ‘school’ (b) ‘fihim ‘he understood’ Kata’bitu ‘she wrote it m.’ dara’bitu ‘she hit him’ ii. Antepenultimate stress (a) in’kasarit ‘it f. was broken’ Yix’talifu ‘they differ’ (b) ‘darasit ‘she learned’ ‘kataba ‘scribes’

CONTRASTING ENGLISH AND ARABIC CONSONANTS The following points of difference have been identified:    

/p/ does not occur in Arabic as a phoneme but as an allophone in some loanwords. /t/ and /d/ are dental in Arabic but alveolar in English. /v/ also does not occur in Arabic, and is usually mispronounced as /f/. There are some consonants that do not occur in standard Arabic, i.e., /ʒ/, /t∫/ and /ŋ/. Standard Arabic and some other dialects use /dʒ/ instead of /ʒ/ and some other dialects (e.g., Egyptian) use /g/. Also / ŋ/ does not occur in Arabic as a phoneme, but it occurs as an allophone of /n/ before stop consonants such as /sin/ sin and /siŋ/ sing; /sinə/ sinner and /siŋə/ singer; /ran/ ran and /raŋ/ rang.

14

Amr M. El-Zawawy       

/n/ is nasal and alveolar in English but dental in Arabic. Arabic /r/ is a tongue tip trill, whereas English /r/ is a flap. Arabic hamza does not exist in English as a phoneme, but as an allophone in certain dialects. Arabic / ġ / does not exist in English at all. Arabic /d/ does not exist in English as a separate phoneme, but as an allophone in such words as ‘dust’ and doll.’ Arabic /q/ does not exist in English and has no allophonic counterpart. Syllabic consonants do not exist in Arabic.

CONTRASTING ENGLISH AND ARABIC VOWELS The following points of difference have been identified:  

English has twelve vowels while Arabic has five vowels. English has eight diphthongs while Arabic has four diphthongs.

CONTRASTING ENGLISH AND ARABIC STRESS PATTERNS English and Arabic possess similar stress rules in that they assign stress to syllables that have long vowels or diphthongs. However, Arabic never stresses final syllables in a word. Arabic also has specific stress rules that allow for very few or no exceptions at all. These rules are based on the alternation of consonants and vowels.

CONCLUSION This brief discussion of the phonology of English and Arabic is just an introduction. Some thorny issues of rhythm and intonation have been avoided, since they require separate volumes. Arab learners should pay special attention to the differences pointed out in this discussion, since their foreign accent is usually a result of not being able to observe how certain consonants are different across the two languages. This may cause them to carry over their native-language pronunciation habits into English.

Chapter 3

WORD-FORMATION IN ENGLISH AND ARABIC: DERIVATION AND COMPOUNDING INTRODUCTION English and Arabic possess two different morphological systems. English morphology can best be described as linear and affixing, while Arabic morphology is often described as nonconcatenative. In this latter type of morphology, the stem of a content word has three discontinuous morphemes (i.e., al-jazr ‫(ﺍﻝﺝﺫﺭ‬: the consonantal root, which is the fundamental lexical unit of the language; the templatic pattern into which the consonantal root is inserted imposing an additional meaning to that of the root; and the vowels which mark variations in, for example, the voice (active or passive) in verbs, agentive relations in nouns derived from verbs, and singular–plural relations in nouns. In English, in contrast, nouns, for example, can be formed by a linear process of affixation as the following illustrates: -ery -dom -hood -ism -ship -age

machinery freedom brotherhood humanism friendship mileage

16

Amr M. El-Zawawy

These two systematically different morphological behaviors shall not be discussed in full in this short chapter, which is limited to the derivational and compounding processes in both English and Arabic.

ENGLISH DERIVATION English derivation is governed by the insertion of affixes, which can be prefixes or suffixes. There are no infixes at all in English. Prefixes can be added to almost all word classes except some adverbs. Thus, ‘pre+determine’ is an example of a prefix plus a verb. Similarly, ‘pre+mature’ is made up of a prefix preceding an adjective. There is also ‘pre+fix’ which is made up of a prefix plus a noun. English also tends to use suffixes in a productive manner to generate a huge corpus of nouns and other word classes. Blevins (in Aarts and MacMahon, 2006) discusses the following types of English suffixes: (i) Class-preserving suffixes: -hood, manhood; -al; economical;-hood, childhood; -ship, friendship; -ics, linguistics; -ess, tigress; -ette, kitchenette. (ii) Class-changing suffixes: a. verb-forming derivational suffixes: -fy, beautify; -ate, fabricate; -en, harden, strengthen; -ize, industrialize. b. noun-forming derivational suffixes: -er, teacher, NewYorker, teenager; -ant, informant; -ee, trainee; -ation, coordination, organization; -ment, employment; -al,refusal; -ing, reading. c. adjective-forming derivational suffixes: -al, logical; -ical,economical;ial, partial, -ful, beautiful; -able,comprehensible; -ish, yellowish, Irish, chidish; -ible,edible; -ed, curved; -ive, possessive; -ative, comparative; itive, additive; -ic,synthetic; -an, European; -ern, western;-ous, joyous; -y, gloomy. d. adverb-forming derivational suffixes: -ly, quickly;-ward(s), backwards; -wise, moneywise, *crabwise1.

1

This asterisk indicates that ‘crabwise’ can function as both an adjective and an adverb.

Word-Formation in English and Arabic

17

ENGLISH COMPOUNDING As Bauer (in Aarts and MacMahon, 2006, 489) contends, ‘there is no known lexical restriction of the words which can be compounded.’ However, it is sometimes claimed that nominalizations do not compound easily with each other. Moreover, it is fair to say that compounds in English have the structure lexemic-base (ibid). The general rule with English compounds is that the modifying (left-hand) element occurs in the stem form (i.e., without being inflected for number or gender). However, some words which otherwise look like compounds have the modifying element marked as plural. The term teeth ridge, for example, is a standard part of linguistic terminology, and teeth as a plural form is irregular, as is the case with teeth, and is thus presumably independently listed in the lexicon. Yet there seem to be some definite sets of regularities for compounds in English as follows (after Frank 1972): -Noun + Noun: post office, spaceship, high school, woman teacher, hegoat, dining-room, parking lot, student teacher, paper basket, self-expression, sunshine, bedroom, department store, physics book. Of particular interest is the view presented by Ibrahim (2010) who prefers to treat such a type of compounds semantically as being of the following subtypes:   

Endocentric N + N = armchair Appositional N + N = maidservant Copulative N + N = Alsace-Lorraine



Possessive noun + noun: lady’s maid, traveler’s checks, a citizen’s bank. Verb + Noun: jump rope, pickpocket, flashlight. Noun + Verb: handshake, lifeguard. Gerund + noun: living room, swimming pool. Noun + gerund: fortune telling, housekeeping, ice skating. Adjective + Noun: gold coin, well-wisher, off-white, high school, smallpox, blackbird, common sense, blue print. Particle + Noun: off-year, by-product, overdose. Verb + prep/Adverb: breakdown, grown-up. Noun + pp: brother-in-law, commander-in-chief.

       

18

Amr M. El-Zawawy

Compounding in English is also viewed within the context of what is termed ‘neo-classical compounds.‘ Examples include genocide and psychology, which were created in modern times using elements from the classical languages Latin and Greek. Such compounds are treated by many accounts (cf. Hall 1964 and Al-Jarf 2000) as made up of two parts. But as Bauer (2006) sees, there are a number of questions about neo-classical compounds in English. It is not altogether clear that they should be treated alongside compounds rather than as a separate type of word-formation. The first part in many of them cannot stand alone. Moreover, do words such as psycholinguistics count as neo-classical compounds or as derivatives?

DERIVATION IN ARABIC: THE ROOT-PATTERN SYSTEM As has been stated above, Arabic morphology is non-concatenative: it consists of a root between its letters (usually consonants) are inserted a number of certain vowels. This is called the root-and-pattern morphology and is usually exemplified by the following: he wrote katab-a (v.) ‫ﻙﺕﺏ‬ he corresponded kaatab-a (v.) ‫ﻙﺍﺕﺏ‬ it was written kutib-a (v.) ‫ﻙﺕﺏ‬ book kitaab (n.) ‫ﻙﺕﺍﺏ‬ books kutub (n.) ‫ﻙﺕﺏ‬ writer; (adj.) writing kaatib (n.) ‫ﻙﺍﺕﺏ‬ writers kuttaab (n.) ‫ﻙﺕﺍﺏ‬ write! (2 m.s.) uktub! (v.) ‫ﺍﻙﺕﺏ‬ office maktab (n.) ‫ﻡﻙﺕﺏ‬ library maktaba (n.) ‫ﻡﻙﺕﺏ ﺓ‬ writing kitaaba (n.) ‫ﻙﺕﺍﺏ ﺓ‬ Verbs in the above examples can have inflectional suffixes. Thus for katab alone, there are the following variations: I wrote Katabtu (first person singular) He wrote Kataba (second person singular, masculine) She wrote Katabat (second person singular, feminine) They (masculine) wrote Katabu (third person plural, masculine)

Word-Formation in English and Arabic

19

They (feminine) Katabna (third person plural, feminine) Both of them wrote Katabaa (third person dual, masculine and feminine) Such non-concatenative morphological behavior is greatly productive. Thus, the consonant root can be viewed as a nucleus or core around which are fit a wide array of potential meanings, depending on which pattern is operating into the root.

ARABIC COMPOUNDING Compounding in Arabic is not as productive as derivation. Most compounds in Arabic are either established or made after a particular foreign pattern via translation. The basic types of compounds in Arabic are as follows (cf. Ibrahim, 2010):   

-Genitive compounds, e.g., ‫ﺃﺏﻭ ﻡﻭﺱﻯ‬abū mousā -Predicative compounds, e.g., ‫ﻑﺕﺡ هللا‬fatḥ Allah -Synthetic compounds, e.g., ‫ ﺡﺽﺭﻡﻭﺕ‬ḥaḍramūt

There are, however, other types which will be discussed below.

Compounding into One Word (Naht, i.e., Compounding by Coinage) Although compounding is not common in traditional Arabic morphology, it is used in MSA for recently coined items and for loan-translations, especially technical terms. Ryding (2005) provides the following examples:   

ra’smaal ‘capital’ formed from conjoining the words ra’s ‘head’ and maal ‘money.’ alaamarkaziyya ‘decentralization,’ from the words laa ‘no’ and markaziyya ‘centralization.’ faw-Sawty ‘supersonic,’ abbreviating the word for ‘above, super’ fawq to faw-, joining it with the noun Sawt ‘sound,’ and suffixing the adjectival /-iyy/ ending.

20

Amr M. El-Zawawy

Compounding into Two Words (Tarkiib, i.e., Two-Word Compounds) This usually results in noun phrases, such as ‘adam wujuud ‘nonexistence’ or kiis hawaa’’airbag,’ or a combined participle-noun phrase such as muta’iaddid-u l-’aṭraaf, ‘multilateral.’2 With the massive rapidity in technical translation into Arabic, these kinds of lexical compounds have become more prevalent over the past two or three decades.

Numerical Compounds In numerals eleven and twelve, the numeral names are compounds, the first part referring to the first digit and the second part always some form of the word ‘ten’ (ašr or ašra), e.g., aḥad ašar, thalath ašar, arba’ašar, etc.

COMPARING THE TWO LANGUAGES English and Arabic are not on a par with the derivation of different word classes. English derivation is linearly managed, since it proceeds through the addition of affixes on the periphery of the word. No infixes are used for derivative purposes. Arabic, in contrast, applies the root-and-pattern morphology in order to produce a large number of derivatives, invoking prefixes, suffixes, infixes and even transfixes. The derivatives are, moreover, inflected for number, gender and case. In compounding, English outwits Arabic. English compounds are based on somehow rigid rules that can be observed and abstracted. Arabic compounds, like English neo-classical compounds, are institutionalized, and new ones are usually composed on analogy with foreign ones, i.e., via literal translation with minor changes.

2Note

that in such cases, the dual or plural is usually made by adding the dual suffix to or pluralizing the head noun, the first noun in the phrase: two bedrooms ġurfat-aa nawm-in ‫ﻑﺕﺍ ﻥﻭﻡ‬ ‫ﻍﺭ‬ three bedrooms ġuraf aanwam ‫ﻍﺭﻑﺍﻝﻥﻭﻡ‬

Chapter 4

LOANWORDS IN ENGLISH AND ARABIC INTRODUCTION Loanwords are usually treated alongside borrowing. Both are integral processes of lexical extension. Borrowing, as a process, is conducive to loanwords that are easily spotted by native speakers, unless the donor language is etymologically related to the recipient language, i.e., the two languages are of the same linguistic family. Thus, European languages which share a common ancestor, such as English and Swedish, share some words that are borrowed across the two, but are hardly recognizable as loanwords, since normalizations have worked their way through them. Similarly, Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic share many words that are cross-borrowed and difficult to pinpoint if presented on a test list. The comparison is more difficult if the two languages are of different families, in this case English and Arabic. The present chapter will seek to discover the regularities that govern loanwords in both languages. English words in Arabic and Arabic words in English will be examined.

LOANWORDS IN THE LINGUISTIC LITERATURE There are several views on the ways in which loanwords are received and normalized in the recipient language. Bynon (1977, 226) maintains that the phonological structure of a great number of loanwords may be either on good terms with that of the borrowing language or close to it. However, some remain unassimilated. According to Bynon (ibid, 227), the speed and degree of

22

Amr M. El-Zawawy

adaptation solely depends on sociolinguistic and structural factors. Strictly speaking, transmitting loanwords through ‘the intermediary of a local spoken variety of the donor language’ yields to the act of substitution at the levels of phonology and/or morphology. Mustafawi (2002) presents three different views with respect to loanwords. The first is adapted from Eliasson (1995) and Myers-Scotton (1992; 1993), who do not distinguish between borrowing and code switching and attribute them to the same mechanism. The second view is also presented by Eliasson (1994) who considers any single word from a donor language that is not an established loanword in the recipient language to be a code switched word. The three authors claim that for a lexical item to be considered a borrowing it must fill a lexical gap in the recipient language. The third view is held by Poplack (1993) who says that borrowing and code switching are different mechanisms. That is, in code switching, the integrity of the grammar of both the donor and the recipient languages is respected, while in borrowing, only the integrity of the grammar of the recipient language needs to be respected. Moreover, borrowings do not necessarily ‘fulfill lexical needs’ in the recipient language. Accordingly, loanwords are best characterized as borrowings, even when their distribution across the community is currently limited. Daher (n.d.) examines the extent and effects of lexical borrowing between American English and Syrian Arabic, focusing on (1) changes to the phonology and morphology of the borrowed words and (2) changes to the phonological structure of the borrowing language. Loanwords with an unfamiliar sound structure are the most likely to go through an adaptive process, so that they will better accord with the phonological structure of the recipient language. Because of their contrasting phonological systems, Arabic is more likely to adopt English words outright -- preserving the original sounds -- while English is more likely to adapt certain Arabic sounds by replacing them with similar English sounds. There is no indication that Arabic loanwords have had any effect on the phonological system of English. English appears, however, to be partly responsible for at least an increase in the use of the sounds /g/, /v/ and /p/ in Syrian Arabic. Hafez (1996) synchronically studies loanwords in Egyptian Arabic, i.e., examining the integration of loanwords at present without studying their etymology. Thus the study does not investigate such diminished loans as /tijatru/, /’esbetalja/, /talletwââr/, and /’agzagi/, which were later replaced by the indigenous /mâsrâh/, /mostašfa/, /râsiif/ and /sajdâli/, respectively. Instead, the paper studies the various degrees of integrating loanwords into the

Loanwords in English and Arabic

23

phonological and morphological systems of EA (Egyptian Arabic). Most loanwords (e.g., /munâwrâ/ from “manoeuvre,” /warsa/ from “workshop,” and /musiiqâ/ from “musica” or “musique”) often undergo such integration so that eventually their foreignness is unfelt and monolinguals use them frequently without the urge to find an indigenous alternative to them (even if one is available).

ARABIC LOANWORDS IN ENGLISH As Gajzlerová (2009) maintains, it is estimated that 80 per cent of the words in the lexicon of English are borrowed. Fromkin and Rodman (1993 in Gajzlerová, ibid) also confirm that of the 20,000 words in common use, about three-fifths are borrowed. A considerable number have been borrowed from Arabic as will be shown below. The inclusion of substantial numbers of Arabic words in English has been viewed with dubiousness. There are instances of words such as ‘fekir,’ ‘cat’ and ‘Trafalgar,’ which are recurrent in many books on the subject. A simple search through the Internet would yield dozens of words that are said to be borrowed from English into Arabic. Consider the following sample (adapted from Wikipedia): admiral ‫ﻝﺏﺡﺍﺭ‬ ‫ ﺃﻡﻱﺭ ﺍ‬amīr al-biḥār, “commander of the seas,” a title in use in Arabic

Sicily and continued by the Normans in Sicily in a Latinized form, and adopted successively by Genoese and French. albatross ‫ ﺍﻝﻍﻁّﺍﺱ‬al-ghaṭṭās, literally “the diver,” presumably a cormorant or another of the pelican birds, which are diving water birds. alchemy, chemistry ‫ﺍﻝﻙﻱﻡﻱﺍء‬al-kīmiyā, alchemy. caliber, calipers ‫ﻕﺍﻝﺏ‬qālib, mold. camphor ‫ﻙﺍﻑﻭﺭ‬kāfūr, camphor. candy ‫ﻕﻥﺩﻱ‬qandi, sugared. Arabic is from Persian qand = “cane [sugar],” and possibly from Sanskritic before that, since cane sugar developed in India.

24

Amr M. El-Zawawy

carat (mass), carat (gold purity) ‫ﻕﻱﺭﺍﻁ‬qīrāt, a very small unit of weight defined by reference to a small seed or grain. The medieval Arabic word had an ancient Greek root keration, literally “carob seed,” also denoting a small unit of weight. caraway (seed) ‫ ﻙﺭﻭﻱﺍ‬karawiyā, caraway seed. It was spelled “caraway” in English in the 1390s in a cookery book. carob (seed) ‫ ﺥﺭّﻭﺏ‬kharrūb, the edible bean of the carob tree. elixir ‫ اإلكسﻱﺭ‬al-’iksīr, alchemical philosopher’s stone. The Arabs took the word from the Greek xērion (then prepended Arabic al- = the), which had entered Arabic with the meaning of a healing powder for wounds. ghoul ‫ ﻍﻭﻝ‬ġūl, ghoul. Its first appearance in English was in a popular novel, Vathek, an Arabian Tale by William Beckford, in 1786. giraffe ‫ ﺯﺭﺍﻑﺓ‬zarāfa, giraffe. Entered Italian and French in the late 13th century. guitar ‫ ﻕﻱﺕﺍﺭﺓ‬qītāra, a kind of guitar. “The name reached English several times, including 14th century giterne from Old French. The modern word is directly from Spanish guitarra, from Arabic qitar.” The original list extends for five or six pages, and the etymologies given are usually diachronically rooted in the long history of the Arabs’ contact with the Greeks. The adaptations were mostly phonological and the loanwords have been morphologically normalized according to Arabic rules of grammar.

ENGLISH LOANWORDS IN ARABIC As Ryding (2005) contends, Arabic has incorporated words from European languages, such as Latin and Greek. In recent times, much of the borrowing has been from English and French. Most of these borrowed nouns are considered solid-stem words, not analyzable into root and pattern. Consider the following:

Loanwords in English and Arabic

25

music ‫( موسيقى‬moosiika) camera ‫كاميرا‬ comedy ‫ كوميديا‬doctor ‫دكتور‬ petroleum ‫ بترول‬ton ‫طن‬ computer ‫ كومبيوتر‬film ‫فيلم‬ television )‫( تليفزيون (تلفاز‬tilīfizyūn) bank ‫بنك‬ telephone ‫تليفون‬ Certain common everyday terms, such as ‘telephone,’ ‘camera,’ and ‘doctor’ also have Arabic-based equivalents (loan translations) (e.g., ‫)هاتف‬, most of which have been coined by consensus of authorities on the Arabic language in the Arabic language academies in Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus. These academies are scholarly research institutes whose primary goal is to maintain the accuracy, richness, and liveliness of the Arabic language through defining standards, prescribing correct usage, and setting procedures for the coining of new terms. Acronyms, however, are used as they are, although they are normalized to appear as one words rather than acronyms. The Arabic newspaper style in particular also borrows acronyms for international bodies and uses them as individual words, spelled in Arabic: UNESCO ‫اليونسكو‬ OPEC ‫األوبك‬ UNICEF ‫اليونيسيف‬ Extensive borrowings have been from English. English loanwords in Arabic are easily spotted either due to their foreign phonology or their morphologically adapted forms. Baker (1987) prefers to consider loanwords in Arabic part of the Arabization process. Below is a discussion of these phonological and morphological adaptations or alternations.

Phonological Changes Phonological changes in English loanwords can be boiled down to the following:

26

Amr M. El-Zawawy

a. Voicing and Devoicing Devoiced phonemes are common in the process of assimilation of lexical borrowings to the phonological system of the host language. In Arabic, in some examples, the English voiced labio-dental fricative /v/ was converted into its voiceless counterpart, namely /f/. This was apparent in the following loanwords: service [sarfi:s], cover [kafar]. However, in other loanwords, /v/ was retained as in receiver [risi:var] and ‘kaviar’ [kaviar] (see Alomoush and Alfaqara, 2010). In voicing, there is substitution of the Arabic voiceless bilabial stop [p] with its English voiced counterpart [b], e.g., ‫[ جروبات‬gru:ba:t] and floppy [ flobi:]. What is more, it was noted that /s/ was voiced as /z/, as in the case of ‘gas’ [ga:z]. b. Vowel Lengthening It was noticeable that sometimes short vowels like /u, o, i/ were lengthened. Moreover, the vowel /o/ is replaced by /a/. This was true of the following English loanwords: motor [ma:to:r] and microphone [makrafo:n] and others. Additionally, in some examples, short vowels in one syllable loanwords were lengthened; for instance, /a/ was lengthened into the long central vowel /a: / as in gas [ga:z]. c. Stress Shifting Hafez (1996) remarks that loanwords follow the same stress patterns of Arabic wherever their source language stress is placed on the last syllable in bi-syllabic words following the pattern (CV(C)-’CVVC) when the last syllable is long. Examples include /dok-’toor/ for “doctor,” /bâs-’boor/ for “passeport,” /?al-’boom/ for “album,” /gor-’nâân/ for “journal,” /mo-’toor/ for “moteur,” /râ-’dââr/ for “radar,” and /do-’lââr/ for “dollar.” Stress falls on the penultimate syllable if the penultimate vowel is long and the last one short (Hassaan 1979, 173) as in /’baa-ku/ for “packet,” /ka-’taa-wet/ for “cutout,” /bal-’loo-na/ for “balloon,” /fâ-’tuu-râ/ for “fattura” i.e., “bill,” and /?o-ma-’tiiki/ or /?o-to-ma-’tii-ki/ for “automatic.” Stress would also fall on the penultimate syllable if both penultimate and final vowels are of medium length. This applies to bisyllabic words as in /’ban-ju/ for “agno” /ka’-set/ for “cassette,” /’sam-bu/ for “shampoo,” /’rad-ju/ (or “radio,” /’war-sa/ for “workshop”; tri-syllabic words as in /ko-’ber-ta/ for “couverture,” /ga-’ket-ta/ for “jacket,” /me-’dal-ja/ or /ma-’del-ja/ for “medallion,” and /nâ-’bât-si/ for “is nobeti”; and quadri-syllabic words as in /bât-tâ-’rej-ja/ for “battery” or “batteria.”

Loanwords in English and Arabic

27

d. Insertion of Initial Glottal Stop Since the phonological system of the Arabic language does not permit the occurrence of the consonant cluster /sk/ in initial position, Standard Arabic might resort to inserting the vowel /i/ at the beginning of the word just after the pause. This is exemplified by scanner [?skanar] and scooter [?sku:tar]. Other examples include accessories [?iksiswa:ra:t], album [?albu:m] and automatic [?u:tuma:ti:k]. e. Insertion of /-a/ Sound in Final Position In words which are difficult to render in acceptable Arabic, /a/ is added to the borrowed word. Examples include ‫كوميديا‬, ‫ بيولوجيا‬and ‫تراجيديا‬, for ‘comedy,’ ‘biology’ and ‘tragedy,’ respectively. f. Segment Substitution Some consonants and vowels do not fit the phonological criteria of the Arabic language. Therefore, they were often substituted with the corresponding segments. Examples include cover [kafar] and joker [ʒo:kar]. The substitutions are usually done by means of the phonologically adjacent sound either in voicing or in place of articulation.

Morphological Changes According to Hafez (1996) and Alomoush and Alfaqara (2010), morphological adaptations can be accounted for in the light of the following criteria: transmorphemization and inflection. Transmorphemization will be first discussed below.

a. Transmorphemization Zero transmorphemization: when English loanwords remain as they occur in English. In this sense, Arabic suffixes are not added to them. For example, link remains as it occurs in English. The same thing applies to keyboard, though some use louhit almafateeh instead. Compromise transmorphemization: When English loanwords retain the English suffix of the source word. For instance, in Arabic, the word scanner retains the suffix -er. This is true of downloading, which keeps the English suffix –ing.

28

Amr M. El-Zawawy

Complete transmorphemization: It refers to the criterion that the original suffix of English loanwords is completely replaced by a corresponding native suffix. There are English loanwords to which the Arabic plural suffix [a:t] may be added. Here are two: [sidiha:t] CDs and [kasita:t] cassettes.

b. Inflection Number Arabic makes a distinction between singular, dual and plural. In Arabic, adding inflected forms to masculine nouns is apparent by the addition of the suffix [e:n], whereas feminine nouns are marked for dual by adding the suffix [te:n]. This was apparent in many English loanwords as in the case of the English loanword email: two emails [?i: mayle:n], two satellite receivers [risi: vare:n], and two female doctors [dokto:rte:n]. Plural Countable nouns, whether masculine or feminine, were regularly pluralized by adding the inflectional suffix [a:t], as in [mubaila:t] “mobiles.” The broken plural pattern is also applied as in the following examples:3 [filim] sing., pl. [?afla:m] “films” (consonantal root: f-l-m ) (vocalic patterns: i-i: and a-a: respectively ) captain [kabtin] sing., pl. [kaba:tin]. (consonantal root: k-b-t-n) (vocalic patterns: a-i and a-a:-i, respectively) “filter” [filtar] sing., pl. [fala:tir]. (consonantal root: f-l-t-r (vocalic patterns: i-a and a-a:-i, respectively). Gender The Arabic inflectional suffix “ah” [ah] was added to mark the femininity on Arabic singular nouns. Accordingly, a set of borrowed words were feminized by adding the above suffix. For example, the word “doctor” may be feminized to be realized as [dokto:rah]. The same thing applies to capsule which was realized in Arabic as [ kabso:lah]. On the other hand, in Arabic, masculine nouns do not have inflectional suffixes to mark their gender; examples of these were: doctor realized as [dakto:r], satellite [satalait], and so on. Since Arabic has grammatical gender rather than natural gender, inanimate objects may have either a masculine gender or a feminine gender.

3For

the 27 forms of the broken plural in Arabic, see Robert Radcliffe, “Arabic Broken Plurals,” Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics II, Mushira Eid and John McCanhy (eds.), John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1990, p. 94-119.

Loanwords in English and Arabic

29

c. Derivation Some loanwords may generate two sets of verbs, one transitive, the other intransitive. For example, the word “nervous,” from which the root “nrfz” is abstracted, thus generating not only the transitive /narfez/, /jenarfez/, /menarfez/, and /narfaza/ but also the intransitive /?etnarfez/, /jetnarfez/, /metnarfez/ and /narfaza/. The same is also true of many computer terms, such as /ysayev/ from the English ‘save (as)’ and /yashayet/ from the English ‘chat.’

CONCLUSION It is clear from this brief discussion that there is a vast difference between the way English and Arabic treat loanwords. The processes by which English accommodates loanwords are not explicitly discussed in the literature: dictionaries of etymology just list the origin of the word and its line of adaptation. A glimpse at the above list of Arabic words brought into English gives a hint that there is no sufficient evidence as to the formation process. In contrast, Arabic boasts a large number of borrowed words, and their process of adaptation is strictly governed by phonological and morphological alternations. Even words not borrowed from English either undergo the same alternations or are left unchanged, i.e., asmaa’ jamidah (solid-stem names).

Chapter 5

PASSIVIZATION IN ENGLISH AND ARABIC INTRODUCTION The passive structure has traditionally been studied under the heading of ‘voice.’ Hartmann and Stork (1976) describe it as a verb form or a particular syntactic structure which indicates a certain relationship between the subject and object in a sentence. Although straightforward, this description is troublesome if viewed within the framework of contrastive analysis. Passivization in English and Arabic is usually considered a rich area for contrastive analysis. The differences between the passive voice in English and in Arabic stem from the fact that passivization in English is straightforward: the rule is applied by a series of transformations that can be generalized over a wide range of cases. Except for a seemingly limited number of verbs in English, almost all transitive verbs can be passivized. At the same time, the passive structure in English has a number of discourse functions that determine its uses and appropriateness. But this is not the case in Arabic. Passivization in Arabic is rather complex, and such complexity stems from the fact that there are several measurements (i.e., awzan) that need to be taken into account. Moreover, the variations in the use of the passive voice across different discourse functions make the task even more difficult: there are cases when two passive markers are appropriate and the justifications are not usually easy to pin down. In this short chapter, passivization shall be compared in English and Arabic in order to discover the differences between the two languages in this particular syntactic aspect. Several examples will be given from both languages to illustrate focal points.

32

Amr M. El-Zawawy

PASSIVIZATION IN ENGLISH Lyons (1968) prefers to discuss the passive voice in English in the light of the following conditions: 1. The object of the active sentence becomes the subject of the corresponding passive sentence. 2. The verb is active in form in the most basic version and passive in form in the less basic version. 3. The subject of the passive sentence is not necessarily expressed overtly, and if so, a particular adjunct or preposition usually fronts it. These conditions are not new, for Chomsky (1965) formalized them in a sequence of transformations as follows: (i) the surface structure; (ii) generalized Transformations (GTs); and (iii) deep structure. Generalized transformations are to relay the surface structure into a deep structure. For example, the following sentence is an active one. The usual Chomskyan treatment is through a surface tree-diagram as follows: The dog ate the bone.

Figure 5-1. A conventional tree diagram for an active structure.

Through a series of transformations, the following diagram is produced:

Passivization in English and Arabic

33

Figure 5-2. A conventional tree diagram for a passive structure.

To mention or not to mention the subject which is fronted by a preposition (usually ‘by’) is a matter of discourse focus. The Functionalists (cf. Daneš 1994) provide an interesting investigation of this matter by discussing the differences between theme, transition and rheme. In a sentence like ‘The floor was brushed by John,’ the theme is the floor, the rheme John and the transition the passive string ‘was brushed.’ This stands in opposition to the active structure, where the transition is an active string. New information is usually expressed by rhemes while given information is often expressed by themes. In this case, passivization is meant to give focus to what might be considered new information from the user’s perspective. Furthermore, Palmer (1996) remarks that there is a difference in meaning between the activized and passivized structures. For example, in ‘Many men read few books’ and ‘Few books are read by many men’ and similarly in ‘Many arrows didn’t hit the target’ and ‘The target wasn’t hit by many arrows,’ it is asserted that there are lots of men who read very little and lots of arrows that did not hit the bull’s eye, while there are few valuable books and one target (Palmer 1996, 123). Yet there are structures in English which are active in form but passive in meaning. Examples include the following (adapted from Khafaji: 1996): 1. The book sold well. 2. The shirt dried. 3. The train filled. 4. This matter relates to the old one.

34

Amr M. El-Zawawy

PASSIVIZATION IN ARABIC Traditional accounts on the passive voice in Arabic focus on the mundane difference between the following: ‫ ضرب الولد الكرة‬ḍarba alwald alkurah ‫ ضُربت الكرة‬ḍurbat alkurah

The transformation from the active into the passive voice is simply carried out through the omission of the subject and adding a diacritic ḍammah and matching the gender agreement. Such accounts also focus on the type of the verb as a way of reducing the complications implicit in the passivization process in Arabic. They provide lists of Arabic verbs that appear in the passive form. A sample list is the following (cf. Al-Jarf 2000, 108) )‫‘ عٌني (بالطفل‬unīya (bilṭifl) )‫ جٌن (الرجل‬jun (arrajul) )‫‘ أٌغمي (عليه‬uġmīya (‘alīh) ‫ سٌقط في يديه‬suqiṭ fī yadīh ‫ ٌغشي عليه‬ġušī ‘alīh ‫‘ أولع بالشئ‬oul’ bilšai’

Other accounts set the problem in a wider context, and include the passive participle in the discussion of Arabic passivization. The passive participle (isml al maf’oul) is usually treated through the number of letters in the root. Still other traditionalists widen the scope of the passive voice to include the form and type of the verb used. In addition to the transitive and intransitive verb types, Al-Akkad (n.d.) discusses the malleable verb (i.e., motawai), which can be exemplified by ‫( فٌتح الباب‬futiḥa al-bab) as opposed to ‫انفتح الباب‬ (infataḥa al-bab). In the following sections, the passive participle is discussed at length as a component of the passive voice in Arabic. But before this, it should be mentioned that, just like English, Arabic, to the surprise of many, imposes

Passivization in English and Arabic

35

certain restrictions on the inclusion of the agent in the passivized structure; this will be the focus after the discussion of the passive participle.

THE PASSIVE PARTICIPLE (ISML AL MAF’OUL) As Ryding (2005) contends, the passive participle (ism al-maf ‘oul) describes the entity that receives the action, or has the action done to it. Arabic passive participles therefore describe or refer to entities involved in an activity, process, or state. The passive participle can be derived from any form. Passive participles can be formed from triliteral as well as quadriliteral verbs. But as Rydnig (ibid) stipulates, in order to have a passive participle, a verb should be transitive. The form of the passive participle describes the result of an action, whether it functions as a noun or an adjective. It may take a broken plural or the sound feminine plural. It refers to a nonhuman entity and the sound masculine plural if it refers to human males. Consider the following list of the nominal passive participles: concept/s ‫مفاهيم‬/‫ مفهوم‬mafhūm/mafāhīm group/s ‫مجموعات‬/‫ مجموعة‬majmū’ah/majmū’āt plan/s ‫مشاريع‬/‫ مشروع‬mašrū’/mašārī’ manuscript/s ‫مخطوطات‬/‫ مخطوطة‬maḳṭūṭah/maḳṭūṭāt implication/s ‫مدلوالت‬/‫ مدلول‬madlūl/madlūlāt topic/s ‫موضوعات‬/‫ موضوع‬mawḍū’/mūḍū’āt movables ‫منقوالت‬/‫ منقول‬manqūl/manqūlāt Passive participles can likewise be adjectives: PP adjective: known ‫ معروف‬ma’rūf busy ‫ مشغول‬mašġūl blessed ‫ مبروك‬mabrūk forbidden ‫ ممنوع‬mamnū’

36

Amr M. El-Zawawy

VERB STRUCTURES AND THE PASSIVE VOICE The following deployment is based on the discussions provided by Cantarino (1974) and Rydnig (2005). The explanations and examples are tailored to the scope of the present chapter. Strong/regular root: The regular root refers to the Arabic base form which does not include a vowel or a glottal consonant (i.e., hamzah). ‫ﻑﻯ ﻭ ٌﻡﻥﻉ ﻡﻥ ﺍﻝﺩﺥﻭﻝ ﺇﻝﻯ ﺍﻝﻡﺩﻱﻥ ﺓ‬ ‫ﻥٌﻕﻝ ﺇﻝﻯ ﺍﻝﻡﺱﺕﺵ‬

nuqil ‘ilā almaschfā wa mun’min addaḳūl ‘ilā almadīna He was transported to the hospital. He was prevented from entering. the city. ٌ ‫ﻙﺕﺏﺏﺡﺭﻭﻑ ﻉﺭﺏﻱ ﺓ‬

kutiba biḥrūf ‘arbya It was written in Arabic letters. Assimilated root: The assimilated root refers to the vowel that naturally occurs at the beginning of the root. ‫ﻉﻝﻯ ﺍﻝﻕﺍﺉﻡ ﺓ‬ ‫ﻭﺽﻉﺕ ﻡﺹﺭ‬

wuḍi’at miṣr ‘alā alqā’ima Egypt was placed on the list. Geminate root: The geminate root is the one that has a doubled consonant in the middle.

‫ﺡٌﺩﺩﺕ ﺍألصوﺍﺕ‬

ḥudidat al’aṣwāt The votes were determined.

Hamzah root: This refers to the root which includes the glottal consonant hamzah in the middle. ‫ﺱﺉﻝﺍﻝﻡﺝﺭﻡ‬ ٌ

su’la almujrim The criminal was interrogated.

Passivization in English and Arabic

37

Hollow root (al-ajwaf): The hollow root (i.e., al ajwaf) is the root that has a vowel in the middle. ‫بيعت إلى أحد التجار‬

biy’t ‘ilā ‘aḥd attujār It was sold to a merchant. Defective root (al-mu’tal): It refers to the root that has a vowel in the end. ‫بٌني المنزل بالطوب‬

bunīya almanzilu bilṭūb The house was built of bricks.

RESTRICTIONS ON THE MENTION OF AGENT When a passive verb is used in Arabic, mention of the identity of the agent or doer of the action is usually omitted: it may be unknown or simply unnecessary. The paradigm is that if the agent is mentioned, the passive construction is not normally used; the active verb is then the preferred option. However, instruments or other inanimate causative factors (such as the weather) may be mentioned by means of prepositional phrases, e.g., ‫فٌتح الباب‬ ‫بالمفتاح‬, roughly translated as ‘The door was opened by/with this key.’ It should be noted that when the subject of the passive verb is mentioned as a separate noun, it is in the nominative case (as in the sentence above, ‘the door’). The technical Arabic term for the subject of a passive verb is naa’ib alfa’afil. This naa’ib is always diacritically inflected as the nominative (see Ryding 2005).

Mention of Agent: Min Qibal, Min Janib, ‘Ala Yad Although the clause ‘min qiabali’ is usually avoided, it is recurrent in the media language where an agent or doer of the action may be mentioned in an Arabic passive sentence. When this is the case, certain phrases tend to be used, just as English would use the term “by.” These are min qibal, ‘ala yad and min janib (Rydnig, 2005):

38

Amr M. El-Zawawy ‫سٌكنت هذه المساجد من قيل المسلمين‬

sukinat haḏhi almasājd min qibal almuslmīn But these mosques are occupied by Muslims. ‫قٌتل على يد المتظاهرين‬

qutila ‘alā yad almutaḓāhrīn He was assassinated by the demonstartors. ‫أٌعلن ذلك الحديث من جانبه‬

‘u’lina ḏalka alḥadīṯ min jānbih This speech was mentioned by him.

CONCLUSIONS AND A COMPARISON BETWEEN THE TWO LANGUAGES Arabic passivization describes or refers to entities involved in an activity, process, or state. Arabic participles are based on a distinction in voice: they are either active or passive. This contrasts with English, where participles are based on tense (present or past) and are used as components of compound verb forms. Arabic participles are not used in the formation of compound verb tenses. Arabic is richer in passive structures than English, where the passive voice is used to lay emphasis on the doer. In English, the transformations involved in passivization are uniform and straightforward, while in Arabic diacritics play a major role by placing dammah on the verb form and changing some of its structure. The differences between Arabic and English in this respect are not simply in structure; there are also differences in the mention of the doer or agent. While English tolerates the mention of the agent, which is always fronted by ‘by,’ Arabic prefers to keep the agent unknown, and if it is mentioned, such phrases as ‘min qibal’ and ‘min janib’ are used. Some linguists, especially Rangkuti (n.d.), contend that in Arabic the agent is not the same as that found in English as the agent in Arabic has been combined to the verb of the sentence. Example in English: Active: My father bought a new motorcycle. Passive: A new motorcycle was bought by (my father).

Passivization in English and Arabic Example in Arabic: ‫قرأ المسلمون القرآن‬

Active: Qara’a al muslimun al-qur’āna. Read+past the+Moslem the+Qur-an. ‘The Moslem read the Qur-an.’ ‫قٌرأ القرآن‬

Passive: Quri’a al qur’anu. Read+pass the+Qur-an. ‘The Qur-an was read.’

39

Chapter 6

SYNONYMY IN ENGLISH AND ARABIC INTRODUCTION Synonymy is a basic semantic concept and a problematic sense relation. It is a property of all natural languages, being oriented towards the preservation of language across centuries. The multiplicity of words that mean the same or are markedly similar in meaning protects language from decay. The notion of synonymy is copiously dealt with in the linguistic literature. Several studies have been made on what synonymy is, whether it exists or not and how words are complete or partial synonyms in many languages. The present chapter will focus on synonymy in English and Arabic in order to discover how the two languages concur or diverge in their definition and types of synonymy.

SYNONYMY IN ENGLISH The problem of synonymy in English has been voluminously examined in the literature on semantic relations at the word level. The problem is not with whether synonymy in general exists or not, but with whether absolute synonymy is found in English or not. The definitions of synonymy and its types, other than absolute synonymy, have also been discussed along very similar lines by many linguists, but the conditions under which synonymy operates differ from one point of view to another. Bolinger (1977, 1) asserts that ‘if two ways of saying the same thing differ in their words or their arrangements they will also differ in meaning.’ Cruse

42

Amr M. El-Zawawy

(1989) prefers to handle synonymity according to certain sub-classes. He classifies synonymity into cognitive synonyms and pleisonyms. Cognitive synonyms, he maintains, ‘must have certain semantic properties in common ‘ (ibid, 270). Pleisonyms are distinguished from cognitive synonyms by the fact that they yield sentences with different truth-conditions. His examples include foggy: misty, fearless: brave, and pretty: handsome, among others. Lyons (1997) sets certain conditions for absolute synonyms: (i) all their meanings are identical; (ii) they are synonymous in all contexts; and (iii) they are semantically equivalent on all dimensions of meaning, both descriptive and non-descriptive. If two or more lexical items fail to satisfy one or two of the above conditions, then they are partial synonyms. Lyons (ibid, 60) points out that near-synonymy, Cruse’s plesionyms are different from partial synonyms in that they are ‘expressions that are more or less similar, but not identical, in meaning.’ He, like Cruse, deems absolute synonymy extremely rare in natural languages (ibid, 61). This actually leads us to Nida‘s definition of synonymy. Nida (1975, 98) states: “In most discussions of meaning, synonyms are treated as though the terms overlap, while in reality what is involved is the overlapping of particular meanings of such terms.” Nida (ibid) then goes on to elaborate on this issue by saying that: “Certain sets of related meanings appear to be so close to one another that one cannot determine whether or not they are complete synonyms. In such instances it may seem impossible to determine just how such meanings may differ from one another… Most persons assume that there are differences of meaning but are unable to indicate what they are. If some speakers suggest what appear to them to be distinctive features of meaning, others will disagree. Such a series meanings highlights two important aspects of semantic analysis: (1) there are closely related meanings which cannot be analyzed, largely because they are marginal to everyday usage; not that the diagnostic components of their meanings are identical, but the features are obscure.(2) There is a tendency to regard different forms as necessarily having different meanings. Basically this presupposition is true, for though a number of homophones exist in all languages, it is doubtful whether there are any real synonyms, i.e., different forms with identical meanings.” (102)

Other linguists, especially Harris (1973), see synonymy as governed by certain differences. Harris (ibid 10) lists nine possible factors:

Synonymy in English and Arabic

43

i. One term is more intense than the other, e.g., repudiate: refuse. ii. One term more general and inclusive in its applicability, e.g., refuse: reject. iii. One term is more highly charged with emotion than the other, e.g., looming: emerging. iv. One term may imply approbation or censure, e.g., thrifty: economical. v. One term is more professional than the other, e.g., domicile: house. vi. One term may belong more to the written language, e.g., passing: death. vii. One term is more colloquial than the other, e.g., turn down: refuse. viii. One term is more dialectal than the other, e.g., flesher: butcher. ix. One term belongs to child-talk, e.g., daddy/dad/papa: father. More recently, Kearns (in Aarts and McMahon, 2006) discusses synonymy in English according to its types. The strictest notion of synonymy, which she calls absolute synonymy, requires absolute identity of all aspects of meaning (including connotation, style and register) for two terms to be classed as synonyms. The diagnostic of absolute identity is complete interchangeability: absolute synonyms would be those that can substitute one another in any context in which their common sense is denoted with no change to truth value, communicative effect. She maintains that absolute synonymy is generally agreed upon to be extremely rare, if not non-existent, although candidates for absolute synonymy, such as everybody/everyone and anyhow/ anyway, are occasionally noted. Kearns further relates the question of synonymy to the Principle of Contrast, i.e., every two linguistic forms contrast each other in meaning. The Principle of Contrast is best seen at work in instances of language change where the so-called absolute synonyms disappear over time, either by the loss of one term or by changes in the sense of at least one term. Chierchia (2006) also examines synonymy in the light of language acquisition and sentence paraphrases as a heuristic for defining synonymy and further examining the viability of the interchangeability condition. To her, knowing a particular language entails knowing which two or more sentences are paraphrases of each other or simply synonyms. Like Kearns (ibid), she uses interchangeability to work out an acceptable definition of synonymy: ‘Two synonymous sentences (and, more generally, two synonymous expressions) can always be used interchangeably’ (565). She (ibid) gives the following assumptions:

44

Amr M. El-Zawawy a) Suppose one utters any complex expression a containing a subexpression (a). If one can replace (a) with a different expression (b), without changing the overall communicative import of (a), then (a) and (b) are synonymous. b) (a) is synonymous with (¼ b) in the utterance of any expression (a) containing (a), (a) can be replaced with (b) without changing the communicative import of the utterance.

Based on these two assumptions, she argues that because the sentences of a language are infinite, it is impossible for speakers to memorize synonymous sentences one by one. Hence, they must recognize synonymy by rule. This rule can be couched in terms of truth conditions in order for informants to be able to compare them and conclude their synonymity. This drives her to reject interchangeability, or substitutivity, as a criterion for discovering synonymy. It can be concluded from this brief survey of the studies on synonymy that synonyms exist in English, but absolute synonymy is problematic: whether absolute synonymy exists or not is a matter of great controversy.

SYNONYMY IN ARABIC As early as the second Hegira century, grammarians spoke of the question of synonymy as a peculiarity of Arabic as a language of huge repertoire. Synonymy in Arabic is defined by Al-Rommani and Al-Razi (in Al-Mari, 1987) as the lexemes which have the same meaning or same ostensive meaning. Al-Rommani (ibid) also discusses the position of synonymy in the Arabic grammar across the ages. However, the topic of absolute synonymy figures as a bone of contention. Among the old grammarians who were in favor of absolute synonymy was Al-’Asmai’i who ascribed this to the richness of Arabic. Other grammarians, especially Qutrub, followed suit. Some of those ancient grammarians even considered synonymy as a healthy phenomenon in Arabic. Ibn khalaweh and al-Fayrūzābādī (in Hasan, n.d.) recognized some benefits of synonymy: 1. The multiplicity of words and methods in order to enable us to express ourselves. That is, in case we forgot a certain word, or it was difficult to pronounce a sound in the word we need, we tend to use its synonym. It is said that a wise old man called Wasel Ibn Ataa had never been heard saying a word that has the sound /r/, because he was

Synonymy in English and Arabic

45

not able to pronounce the /r/ sound, so he used other words as synonyms all his life. 2. Synonyms assist in eloquence, rhythm, etc. 3. There are certain words in Arabic that have many synonyms in such a way that one cannot deny the existence of synonymy, e.g., lion:‫األسد‬ ‫ الضيغم‬,‫ الليث‬,‫ الهرماس الغضنفر‬,‫أسامة‬, al’asd, alġaḍanfar, allayṭ, alḍaīġm, ‘usāma, alhirmās. In modern times, some grammarians provided justifications. Al-Shaya’ (1993; passim) furnishes the following as reasons for the existence of absolute or full synonyms in Arabic: 1. The richness of the morphological bases of Arabic. 2. The fact that some adjectives become so widespread that they are treated as nouns and synonyms of the original other nouns, e.g., ‫السيف‬: ‫( الحسام‬i.e., sword). 3. Loanwords that entered Arabic. 4. Metaphorical uses (i.e., al majaz) of the words, e.g., ‫اللغة‬: ‫( اللسان‬alluġa: al-lisan). Yet a group of coevals opposed this view and opted for differentiating among words which purport to have the same meaning. In ancient times, this group of opponents included Al-Hamazani, Ibn Khalaweih, Ibn Seedah and Al-Razi. But chief among them was Ib Al-Faris, who provided a number of basic differences among such words as ‫المائدة‬: ‫( الخوان‬alma’idah: alkhowan)4 and ‫القلم‬: ‫( األنبوبة‬al’anboubah: alqalam)5. More advanced studies were conducted by Al-’Askari in the fourth century A.H. His Al-Forouk AlLuġaweyya (Linguistic Distinctions) is by far the most comprehensive. Al’Askari argues that if two words are exactly the same in meaning, one of them must be dropped because it will then be a tautology. He also examines many Arabic words that seem to be absolutely synonymous but have substantial differences, e.g., ‫الكبر‬: ‫التيه‬, (attih: al-kibr), 6‫النصيب‬: ‫( القسمة‬al-qismah: annasiib)7 and ‫الفساد‬: ‫( الغي‬al-ġayy: al-fasad)8.

Both have the meaning of ‘a table.’ Both have the meaning of 'a pen' or ‘a quill.’ 6 Both have the meaning of ‘haughtiness.’ 7 Both have the meaning of ‘fortune.’ 8 Both have the meaning of ‘corruption’ and ‘temptation.’ 4 5

46

Amr M. El-Zawawy

In modern times, the group of opponents extended to include a handful of eminent scholars such as Anis, Bishr and Mubarak, among others. Anis (in AlMasri, 1987)9 turns attention to the effect of dialects and temporality as major criteria in differentiating among words. Bishr (in ibid) also maintains that absolute synonymy exists as an abstract term, not recognizable through tangible evidence. Mubarak (ibid) considers absolute synonymy as a sign of language depletion at times of degradation. Al-Masri (1987) and Al-Muhsini (n.d.) prefer to go a step further by discussing the sources of synonymy in Arabic as an attempt at discovering whether absolute synonymy exists or not. The first source is tribal competition; that is, one Arab tribe coined a name and another opposed it. The second source is the traditional Arabic dictionaries. They followed that tribal competition, claiming that their data were authoritative. The third source is the fact that some adjectives become so widespread that they are treated as nouns and synonyms of the original other nouns, e.g., ‫األسد‬: ‫( العباس‬al’asad: al’abbas)10. The fourth source is phonological and semantic development, e.g., ‫هلبت السماء‬: ‫‘( ألبت السماء‬alibat assama’: halibut assama’)11. The fifth source is the ancient Arabs’ preoccupation with poetic musicality, which made them seek rhyming words despite the subtle differences in meaning. The sixth source is the decay of meaning differences with the passage of time, e.g., ‫الشك‬: ‫الريبة‬ (aššak: arriybah)12.

COMPARISON BETWEEN THE TWO LANGUAGES From the telescoped discussion above, it is clear that synonymy is semantically problematic in both languages in question. English linguists are intent on classifying synonyms according to their use; this drives them to consider absolute synonymy rare, if non-existent. They have also evolved conditions under which synonymous words are clearly differentiated. These conditions are spatiotemporal (i.e, based on geographical and temporal dialects) and truth-based ones (i.e., based on logic). Yet the bottom line is that if two words have exactly the same meaning according to the conditions briefly presented, one of these words must fall into disuse.

Al-Masri has annotated Al-Romānī’s Al’alfādh almatrādfa almatqārba alma‘nā. Both are variant names for the lion. 11 Both mean that the sky was pouring. 12 Both have the meaning of ‘doubt’ or ‘dubiety.’ 9

10

Synonymy in English and Arabic

47

Arab grammarians share the same belief, but some see synonymy as an emblem of the authenticity and richness of the Arabic language. Those who support absolute synonymy maintain that such a type is clearly existent and opens up vistas for substitutivity to avoid boredom. Others believe that absolute synonymy is a falsified notion, since, as the English linguists contend, two words with exactly the same meaning cannot co-exist. Synonyms in English and Arabic are similarly defined: they are semantically very akin to each other, but differ in some other regards. Both languages consider partial synonymy the solution for the case of absolute synonyms. However, in English, the scale of synonynmity is rather elaborate: there are absolute synonyms (if any), partial synonyms (highly current) and near-synonyms (even more highly current). This scale is peripherally augmented by some differentia such as the factors of colloquialism and spatial and temporal dialects. Other factors, as Harris (1973) argues, include professionalism and register. In Arabic, the situation is marked by those who are for and those who are against absolute synonymy. Arab grammarians, ancient and modern, are driven by the fact that synonymy is part of language continuity: if absolute synonymy is non-existent, modes of expression would diminish. Those grammarians are divided into supporters of synonymy on a large scale, including absolute synonyms, and those who see partial or nearsynonyms more plausible, as a better approach to the Arabic language for those who are interested in composition (cf. Al-’Askari and Ibn Seedah). This latter approach is similar to the one adopted by modern linguists.

Chapter 7

IDIOMS IN ENGLISH AND ARABIC INTRODUCTION Idiomatic expressions are a recurrent feature in almost all natural languages described in the linguistic literature hitherto. They are one of the manifestations of the arbitrariness of linguistic expressions, and are often included as a separate topic in any textbook on semantics. Crystal (1980) defines them as the sequences of words which are semantically and often syntactically restricted. Trask (1999) describes them as those expressions whose meaning cannot be recovered from the meanings of their constituents. Iffil (2002, 2) also has a similar definition: ‘an idiom is a fixed expression whose meaning cannot be taken as a combination of the meanings of its component parts.’ These definitions point to important facts about idioms. Idioms are rigidly fixed in their semantics and often in their syntactic structures. They are also made up of component parts that are otherwise meaningful in their own right. These facts entail a discussion of the semantics and syntax of idioms. The present chapter is concerned with the exploration of idioms in both English and Arabic within the framework of their semantic and syntactic behavior.

IDIOMS IN ENGLISH Two influential scholars, Cruse (1986) and Palmer (1996), have discussed the notion ‘idiom’ in English in an attempt to discover its regularities both semantically and syntactically. But it is worth noting that some other accounts

50

Amr M. El-Zawawy

on idioms prefer to divide them into types governed by syntactic structures rather than entire units. For example, Boatner and Gates (1975 in Awwad, 1976) divide English idioms into lexemic, phraseological and proverbial. Examples of lexemic idioms include ‘hammer and tongs’ and ‘cut and dried,’ while phraseological and proverbial idioms are exemplified by ‘fly off the handle’ and ‘air your dirty linen in public,’ respectively. The first attempt was made by Cruse‘s (1986). Cruse is intent on exploring idioms alongside dead metaphors under the umbrella of syntagmatic relations. Using the notion of ‘semantic constituent,’ he opts for noncircularity in defining idioms. Thus, he requires from an idiom two salient properties: (a) to be lexically complex and (b) to be a single minimal semantic constituent (i.e., having its meaning wholesale not in virtue of the meanings of its components). These two stipulations inherently exclude non-idioms such as ‘help’ and ‘destroy’ and render expressions such as ‘by and large’ and ‘far and away’ (as asyntactic idioms). Moreover, Cruse (ibid) cautions against the interruptions and reorderings in idiomatic expressions. For instance, ‘pull someone’s left leg’ and ‘kick the large bucket’ are not idioms, since ‘left’ and ‘large’ interrupt them, and similarly ‘the bucket was kicked’ is not idiomatic due to reordering. Cruse also discusses dead metaphors and proverbs. Although both are very similar to idioms, they should be distinguished13. As Cruse (ibid) contends, a metaphor induces the reader (or hearer) to view an object or state of affairs as being like something else by applying to the former linguistic expressions normally peculiar to the latter, e.g., ‘leave no stone unturned.’ Palmer (1996) prefers to discuss idioms in the context of collocations. Thus ‘fly off the handle’ and ‘kick the bucket’ include the collocations of ‘fly’ and ‘kick’ in addition to the opacity of the resultant combination. Palmer states that semantically idioms do not function like single words. Therefore it is not possible to add the past marker –ed to the whole string ‘kick the bucket’ to be *’kick the bucketed.’ Moreover, there are some restrictions on pluralization. For instance, ‘spill the beans’ cannot be made ‘spill one bean.’ Additionally, cleft structures cannot be applied to all idioms, e.g., *’It was the bean that was spilled.’ Unlike Cruse (1986), Palmer speaks of types of idioms. He considers phrasal verbs one of these types, being made up of more than one word and having a meaning not recoverable from their parts. There are also partial idioms. For example, ‘red hair’ does not have the usual meaning of red and 13

This view runs counter to the one expressed by Boatner and Gates (1975) above, since they include proverbs in the class of idioms.

Idioms in English and Arabic

51

hair as color terms. Similarly, ‘white coffee’ and ‘white wine’ are idiomatic in the sense that white is not strictly defined as an absence of color. Thus, it can be concluded that English idioms are fixed expressions but they exhibit peculiar semantic and syntactic behavior. They may also subsume phrasal verbs and a partial type. But the most important fact about idioms is that they cannot be broken down into meaningful units.

IDIOMS IN ARABIC Idioms in Arabic enjoy a long record of discussion. Since 1008, Arab grammarians devoted entire books to the topic. For example, as Fayed (2003.) mentions, Al-Tha’alibi included many idiomatic expressions in his book Thimar Al-Qulub (Fruitions of the Heart). Similarly, Al-Zamakhshari compiled a dictionary of idiomatic expressions a century after (ibid), calling it Assas Al-Balagha (The Foundations of Rhetoric). In recent times, Hamzawi (n.d.), Fayed (2003) and Awwad (1990) studied the structure and function of the idiomatic expression in Arabic in the light of modern linguistics. It is pertinent to discuss those recent attempts to discover the regularities of Arabic idioms. Al-Hamzawi (n.d.) maintains that idioms in Arabic should be examined in the light of their main property, which is their frozen status. This property they share with proverbs. This argument requires differentiating between the two regarding the way they are used. Starting with the proverb, Hamzawi (ibid) lists the following properties: 1. It is a semantic unit whose meaning is different from the meanings of its components. 2. It is not open to reordering, since it is morphologically frozen. 3. It cannot be literally translated into a foreign language, but should be rendered communicatively. 4. It is semantically compact, being made of two or three words. To him, proverbs are akin to idioms. However, in his discussion of idioms, Al-Hamzawi (ibid) opts for identifying four types: 1. 1. Proper name idioms: ‫ يوم حليمة‬yawm ḥalīma and mawā’īd ‘urqūb (both indicating unfulfilled promises).

‫مواعيد عرقوب‬

52

Amr M. El-Zawawy 2. Idioms that include unknown events, e.g., ‫ جنت على نفسها براقش‬jant ‘alā nafs-hā barāqš (indicating a wrong decision at the wrong time). 3. Idioms related to people who uttered them or mentioned them in holy books, then those idioms became quotations, e.g., ‫لحاجة في نفس يعقوب‬ ‫ قضاها‬liḥāja fī nafs ya’qūb qaḍāhā (indicating an unknown reason). 4. The proverbial expression (i.e., proverbs).

It is clear from Al-Hamzawi’s typology that idioms and proverbs are confused. Such a classification of idioms transparently runs counter to what Cruse (1986) sees. Fayed (2003) provides a rather elaborate examination of idioms. Her approach is more similar to modern linguistic approaches, since it invokes semantic, syntactic and sociolinguistic tools to discover how idioms are structured and used in MSA. Fayed defines an idiom as a fixed expression pertaining to a certain language, and made up of one or more words and whose meaning cannot be worked out through the meanings of its constituent parts. This definition is clearly similar to the ones deployed in the introduction of the present chapter. Fayed also identifies the following types of idioms in Arabic: 1. Extra-constituent idioms: e.g., ‫( حدائق الشيطان‬Devil’s Gardens) and ‫جلد‬ ‫( الذات‬self-flagellation). 2. Descriptive idioms: e.g., ‫( التصفية الجسدية‬liquidation), ‫البنية التحتية‬ (infrastructure), and ‫( التطهير العرق‬ethnic cleansing). 3. Verbal idioms: e.g., ‫( يعطي الضوء األخضر‬give the red light) and ‫يرفع‬ ‫( الراية البيضاء‬hoist the white flag). 4. Nominal idioms: e.g., ‫( اللعب في الوقت الضائع‬play in the injury time) and ‫( اللعب على المكشوف‬play over the board). 5. Phrasal idioms: e.g., ‫(بعد خراب مالطة‬after Malta has been destroyed) and ‫( على الهواء‬on air). Furthermore, Fayed (ibid) speaks of the sources of idiomatic expressions in Arabic. There are idioms which are adapted via translation from foreign languages, especially English, e.g., ‫( الخطوط الحمراء‬red lines) and ‫الخط الساخن‬ (hotline). There are also idioms taken from gaming, e.g., ‫( خلط األوراق‬shuffling). Still other idioms are taken from the medical and military registers, e.g., ‫غسل‬ ‫( المخ‬brainwashing) and ‫( ساعة الصفر‬the zero hour), respectively.

Idioms in English and Arabic

53

Awwad (1990) prefers to divide Arabic idioms into the following: 1. Lexemic: this type is further subdivided into: a. Verbal: e.g., ‫( اقتحم البيت‬to break into a house). b. Nominal: e.g., ‫( قاسم مشترك‬a common denominator). c. Adverbial: e.g., ‫ (جاء سبهلال‬to act haphazardly). d. Adjectival: e.g., ‫( أحر من الجمر‬in full swing). 2. Phraseological: e.g., ‫( من أعماق قلبه‬wholeheartedly). 3. Proverbial: e.g., ‫( من سار على الدرب وصل‬to achieve something through hard work). It is noteworthy that Awwad‘s typology equates proverbs with idioms, which is what is cautioned against by Cruse (1986).

COMPARISON BETWEEN THE TWO LANGUAGES It is clear that idioms in the two languages in question are not treated in the same way. English semanticists examine idioms in the light of their uniqueness both semantically and syntactically. Cruse (1986) and Palmer (1996) tackle idioms as fixed expressions that cannot be semantically broken down. They also note that they are not always open to reordering or passivation. Such peculiarities make idioms similar to phrasal verbs as Palmer (ibid) contends. The problem with Arab grammarians, on the other hand, is that most of them have followed the tradition of including proverbs under idioms. Such an inclusion has led to the confusion of defining the basic properties of Arabic idioms. As Al-Hamzawi (n.d.) and Awwad (1990) maintain, there are proverbial idioms whose precise meanings are sometimes difficult to discover due to their unknown sources. Despite these similarities, idioms in both languages are usually frozen expressions that cannot be deciphered based on their components. In English, there are a limited number of idioms, often collected in specialized dictionaries. In contrast, idioms in Arabic are often seen as traditional and borrowed via calqued translation. Traditional idioms are taken from old grammars and the Qur’an or the prophetic tradition. Borrowed or calqued idioms are ever-expansive, being based on journalese. This latter type is usually carried into Arabic via translation, and is rarely included in mainstream dictionaries.

Chapter 8

COHESION AND COHERENCE IN ENGLISH AND ARABIC JUST BEFORE STARTING: DEMARCATING THE BORDERS BETWEEN COHESION AND COHERENCE The notion of ‘coherence‘ might be problematic, especially when viewed in relation to cohesion. There are some models that consider cohesion and coherence synonymous, being both derived from the verb ‘cohere.’ Other models consider the two disparate. Both views are discussed below. Knott‘s (1996) is a case in point. She prefers to discuss cohesion and coherence under one umbrella term, which is ‘coherence relations.’ She (ibid, 1-2) believes that coherence can be discussed in the light of incoherence. Moreover, she underlines the role of context in coherence, giving the following example: 1. Sally decided to take the history course. The ducks on the lake were not eating the bread. Knott (ibid, 3) maintains that the above text can be perfectly understood if Sally is imagined to have unusual superstitions about the ducks on the lake. Knott‘s prelude to coherence relations is the processing of coherence itself. This is done, she contends (ibid, 12-13), in view of ‘text spans’ which are textual units of the size of a clause or even lager. We can apply her ‘theory’ to the following context:

56

Amr M. El-Zawawy

--------------------- (Evidence) (Elaboration) Bill can’t be feeling well. He didn’t eat. He didn’t even drink the soup. Figure 8-1. Knott‘s ‘text spans.’

The horizontal lines represent text spans, and the curved line represents the relation between them. She divides coherence relations into the following (ibid 16-20): 1. 2. 3. 4.

Additives: complex, apposition, comparison. Adversatives: contrastive, correction, dimensional. Causal: specific, conditional, respective. Temporal: sequential, simultaneous, conclusive, correlative.

What is notable here is that Knott‘s approach views cohesion and coherence as intimately close to each other. The same view is adopted by Redeker (2000, 4) who maintains that: “A widely accepted current paradigm for the description of textual coherence is a group of approaches that describe text organization in terms of coherence relations, rhetorical relations, or discourse structure relations.” On the other hand, there are approaches which insist on the separation between the two terms theoretically. Hobbs‘ (1987) is a case in point. He (ibid 6) maintains that the cohesive relations studied by Halliday and Hasan (1976) can be seen as deriving from coherence relations. Hobbs (ibid) provides a classification of coherence relations as follows: 1. Elaboration: ‘Go down Washington Street. Just follow Washington Street three blocks to Adams Street.’ The pattern is recognized by inferring ‘going’ from ‘following’ and matching the paths from the two sentences. 2. Parallel: ‘Set the stack pointer to zero, and set link variable P to ROOT.’ 3. Contrast: ‘You are not likely to hit the bull’s eye, but you’re more likely to hit the bull’s eye than any other equal area.’ It is clear that Hobbs‘ coherence relations make no reference to cohesive markers, and thus underpin the role of inferencing and implication in coherence as opposed to explication in cohesion.

Cohesion and Coherence in English and Arabic

57

Mani et al. (2003) also underline the differences between cohesion and coherence. To them, coherence is a reflection of the hierarchical structure of the text to achieve certain argumentative goals, whereas cohesion is brought about by the use of linguistic devices that are dispersed in different portions of the text to lend it connectedness. Ben-Anath (2006) also concurs, bringing to the fore the role of connectives in discourse comprehension. She (ibid: 3) criticizes Halliday and Hasan‘s model (1976) as incomplete in terms of text understanding. She quotes Blakemore’s (1992) view which emphasizes the shift from linguistic connectivity (i.e., by means of explicit cohesive markers) to connectivity of content (i.e., by means of coherence relations).

COHERENCE-BASED MODELS IN ENGLISH van Dijk’s Model (1977) van Dijk’s model of discourse comprehension has revolutionized text linguistics and discourse analysis. It has established basic notions such as coherence, frames, scripts, microstructures and macrostructures. It has also paved the way for further explorations in pragmatics and cognitive linguistics through van Dijk’s collaboration with Kintsch (1978). van Dijk’s model (1977) derives its importance from emphasis on the role of coherence as a starting point for pragmatic analysis on more global levels (i.e., microstructures and macrostructures). van Dijk (1977, 93) defines coherence as ‘a semantic property of discourses, based in the interpretation of each individual sentence relative to the interpretation of other sentences.’ He (ibid 96) believes that coherence relations exist between propositions (like those explained above); values must thus be assigned to these propositions or parts of sentences. He also speaks of ‘model structures’ which depend on each other; individuals may be introduced or eliminated in the course of discourse, and each sentence is to be interpreted with respect to its ‘actual domain of individuals’ (van Dijk’s term). This implies, as he maintains, that sentences in a discourse are connected to each other so that interpretation occurs a priori. Moreover, ‘properties’ or ‘relations’ (i.e., predicate values) change for an individual ‘at different time points and in different possible worlds’ (96). Thus, a discourse containing two propositions like John is ill and John is not ill may not be inconsistent. van Dijk (ibid) gives a concrete example of coherence at work. The following passage is cited:

58

Amr M. El-Zawawy “Clare Russel came into the Clarion office on the following morning, feeling tired and depressed. She went straight to her room, took off her hat, touched her face with a powder puff and sat down at her desk. Her mail was spread out neatly, her blotter was snowy and her inkwell was filled. But she didn’t feel like work…” (98-99)

van Dijk discusses one important cognitive condition of semantic coherence through this passage, i.e., the ‘assumed normality of worlds involved’ (99). He identifies the term as the role played by individuals’ knowledge about the structures of worlds in general and of particular states of affairs or courses of events in determining expectations about the semantic structures of discourse. Thus, normal propositions can be added to the above passage as well as abnormal ones. van Dijk lists the following as abnormal propositions (or discourse alternatives): 1-(…) took off her clothes (…) 2-(…) threw her desk out of the window (…) 3- (…) her mail was hanging on the wall (…) 4-(…) she drank her inkwell (…) He introduces here the notion of ‘frame, which is ‘[t]he set of propositions characterizing our conventional knowledge of some more or less autonomous situation (activity, course of events, state)’ (ibid 90-91). The above example illustrates the office frame with all its events and contents. van Dijk (ibid 102-103) summarizes coherence conditions as follows: 1. Each situation of each model of the discourse model is either identical with an actual (represented) situation or accessible from this situation. 2. There is at least one individual function for all the counterparts of this function. 3. For all other individuals, there is a series of other functions defined by relations of partiality (inclusion, part-whole, membership, possession). 4. For each property (or relation) applied to the same individual in the successive models of discourse model, there is a more comprehensive property or a dimension containing sets of characteristics. 5. For each fact in the subsequent models of the discourse model, there is a fact that is a condition of other facts or a consequence of it.

Cohesion and Coherence in English and Arabic

59

6. A sequence of sentences consisting of two coherent sequences is coherent if there is a relation such that individuals or properties of the two topics or frames satisfy this relation in the discourse, or if the first sequence contains a predicate giving possible access to the possible worlds in which the second sequence is satisfied. van Dijk touches upon inferencing as a consequence of coherence in discourse: “It has been remarked several times that natural language discourse is not EXPLICIT. That is, there are propositions which are not directly expressed, but which may be INFERRED from other propositions which have been expressed. If such implicit propositions must be postulated for the establishment of coherent interpretations, they are what we called MISSING LINKS.”(Original emphasis) (108)

To van Dijk (109), inferencing is closely related to ‘completeness,’ i.e., the degree to which information is explicit in a discourse. The following examples (109) well illustrate the point: 1. John came home at 6 o’clock. He took off his coat and hung it on the hat stand. He said ‘‘Hi, love’’ to his wife and kissed her. He asked ‘‘How was work at the office today?” and he took a beer from the refrigerator before he started washing up the dishes… 2. John came home at 6 o’clock and had his dinner at 7 o’clock. 3. John came home at 6 o’clock. Walking to the main entrance of the flat he put his hand in his left coat pocket, searched for the key to the door, found it, took it out, put it into the lock, turned the lock, and pushed the door open; he walked in and closed the door behind him(…) Example 1 is, van Dijk argues, a relatively complete action discourse: all actions of roughly the same level have been referred to. Example 2 is incomplete, however: it does not mention John’s activities between 6 and 7 o’clock. Example 3 is over-complete: it details actions that can be easily inferred. An under-complete discourse, van Dijk (ibid 110) maintains, may run as follows:

60

Amr M. El-Zawawy

4. (…) He put his hand in his left pocket and searched for the key. He turned the lock. He closed the door (…) In this example, details are given of one action but not of the other actions. van Dijk’s model, moreover, makes reference to higher levels of discourse processing, namely macrostructures. They are global structures that organize discourse structures in a memorable way. Macrostructures (van Dijk 1977, 143) have the functions of organization, in processing and memory, of complex semantic information; this information will be reduced to macrostructures. Thus, the following text can be boiled down to ‘Fairview was dying’: Fairview was dying. In the past, it had been a go-ahead, prosperous, little town and its large factories, specializing in hand-tools, had been a lucrative source of wealth. (143)

van Dijk finally discusses the cognitive bases of macrostructures: “In ACTUAL PROCESSING, these operations [i.e., information reduction ones] are however HYPOTHETICAL or PROBABLISTIC: during input and comprehension of a certain sentence and underlying propositions the language user tentatively constructs the macroproposition which most likely dominates the proposition in question. This hypothesis may be confirmed or refuted by the rest of the discourse. In case of refutation another macro-proposition is constructed.” (Original emphasis) (157)

van Dijk (159) also maintains that his model is based on hierarchicality: discourse processing does not proceed linearly through micro-information; hierarchical rules and categories and the formation of macro-structures are necessary.

De Beaugrande and Dressler’s Model (1981) De Beaugrande and Dressler’s model of coherence-based comprehension is one of the most influential. It derives its significance from the fact that it provides an integrated theory of human text-processing together with graphic

Cohesion and Coherence in English and Arabic

61

illustrations of the salient processes of coherence. The model has undergone two stages of development, which are explicated below. De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981, 90) define coherence in the light of a continuity of senses; “[a] ‘senseless’ or ‘nonsensical’ text is one in which text receivers can discover no such continuity, usually because there is a serious mismatch between the configuration of concepts and relations expressed and the receivers’ background knowledge” (96). De Beaugrande and Dressler further pose the following questions as a stepping stone (ibid 96): 1. How do people extract and organize content from texts for use in storing and recalling? 2. What factors of the interaction between the presented text and people’s prior knowledge and disposition affect these activities? 3. What regularities can be uncovered by varying factors such as the style of the surface text or the user groups to whom the text is presented? 4. What is the role of expectations? An initial step towards exploring the above questions, they explain, is to redefine coherence. Thus, coherence is “the outcome of combining concepts and relations into a NETWORK composed of KNOWLEDGE SPACES centered on main TOPICS” (96; original emphasis). De Beaugrande and Dressler’s model focuses as such on reception of text rather than production. Their main point is to discover ‘control centers,’ i.e., points from which both accessing and processing of texts can be strategically done. These centers are termed ‘primary concepts’: (a) OBJECTS: conceptual entities with a stable identity and constitution; (b) SITUATIONS: configurations of mutually present objects in their current states; (c) EVENTS: occurrences which change a situation or a state within a situation; (d) ACTIONS: events intentionally brought about by an agent. ‘Secondary concepts,’ on the other hand, incorporate the following (9697): (a) STATE: the temporary, rather than characteristic, condition of an entity;

62

Amr M. El-Zawawy (b) AGENT: the force-possessing entity that performs an action and thus changes a situation; (c) AFFECTEDENTITY: the entity whose situation is changed by an event or action in which it figures as neither agent nor instrument; (d) RELATION: a residual category for incidental, detailed relationships like ‘father-child,’ ‘boss-employee,’ etc.; (e) ATTRIBUTE: the characteristic condition of an entity (cf. ‘state’); (f) LOCATION: spatial position of an entity; (g) TIME: temporal position of a situation (state) or event; (h) MOTION: change of location; (i) INSTRUMENT: a non-intentional object providing the means for an event; (j) FORM: shape, contour, and the like; (k) PART: a component or segment of an entity; (l) SUBSTANCE: materials from which an entity is composed; (m) CONTAINMENT: the location of one entity inside another but not as a part or substance; (n) CAUSE; (o) ENABLEMENT; (p) REASON; (q) PURPOSE; (r) APPERCEPTION: operations of sensorially endowed entities during which knowledge is integrated via sensory organs; (s) COGNITION: storing, organizing, and using knowledge by sensorially endowed entity; (t) EMOTION: an experientially or evaluatively non-neutral state of a sensorially endowed entity; (u) VOLITION: activity of will or desire by a sensorially endowed entity; (v) RECOGNITION: successful match between apperception and prior cognition; (w) COMMUNICATION: activity of expressing and transmitting cognitions by a sensorially endowed entity; (x) POSSESSION: relationship in which a sensorially endowed entity is believed (or believes itself) to own and control an entity; (y) INSTANCE: a member of a class inheriting all non-cancelled traits of the class; (z) SPECIFICATION: relationship between a superclass and a subclass, with a statement of the narrower traits of the latter; (aa) QUANTITY: a concept of number, extent, scale, or measurement;

Cohesion and Coherence in English and Arabic

63

(bb) MODALITY: concept of necessity, probability, possibility, permissibility, obligation, or of their opposites; (cc) SIGNIFICANCIE: a symbolic meaning assigned to an entity; (dd) VALUE: assignment of the worth of an entity in terms of other entities; (ee) EQUIVALENCE: equality, sameness, correspondence, and the like; (ff) OPPOSITION: the converse of equivalence; (gg) CO-REFERENCE: relationship where different expressions activate the same text-world entity (or configuration of entities); (hh) RECURRENCE: the relation where the same expression reactivates a concept, but not necessarily with the same reference to an entity, or with the same sense. De Beaugrande and Dressler (ibid 98) add other operators, such as a determinateness operator, a typicalness operator, a termination operator, an exit operator, etc. They analyze the following text fragment using the concepts outline above: “A great black and yellow V-2 rocket 46 feet long stood in a New Mexico desert. Empty it weighed five tons. For fuel it carried eight tons of alcohol and liquid oxygen.” (98)

They argue that human processors apply strategies of problem-solving assisted by three basic operations: spreading activation (of nodes), inferencing, and global patterns. They also add the following fragments to the above piece of text: Everything was ready. [2.2] Scientists and generals withdrew to some distance and crouched behind earth mounds. [2.3] Two red flares rose as a signal to fire the rocket. With a great roar and burst of flame the giant rocket rose slowly at first and then faster and faster. [3.2] Behind it trailed sixty feet of yellow flame. [3.3] Soon the flame looked like a yellow star. [3.4] In a few seconds, it was too high to be seen, [3. 5] but radar tracked it as it sped upward to 3,000 mph. (99-100)

For the entire text, they provide an intricate network. Later, however, de Beaugrande (1981, 2005) revises the model, coming up with novel concepts. He introduces four basic concepts: parsing

64

Amr M. El-Zawawy

(identifying the grammatical dependencies of the surface text), concept recovery (associating language expression with cognitive content), idea recovery (building the central conceptual configuration that organizes content) and plan recovery (identifying the plans and goals that the text is intended to pursue). Back-tracking, he argues, is freely allowed among these phases, and the model permits approximations depending on individual readers’ capacities. The initial processing unit is the stretch of text that can be ‘comfortably held in the working memory under current limitations of attention, familiarity, and interest’ (de Beaugrande, 2005). Thus, clauses, a group of sentences, etc. can be considered suitable processing units. (See the controversy over UT below.) The goal of processing, he argues (28), is not syntactic analysis, but rather building a model of a textual world, which is ‘reconstituted’ by the reader. De Beaugrande (29-33) uses the self-same ‘rocket’ example, giving the same mental networks developed before. He only adds the world-knowledge correlate technique, which contains facts readers would be likely to know before encountering the text, e.g., rockets use fuel to operate, burning fuel produces flares, etc.

Centering Theory (Grosz and Sidner, 1986) Grosz and Sidner (1986) distinguish among three components of discourse structure: linguistic structure, intentional structure, and attentional state. The first component, the linguistic structure, is supposed to group utterances into discourse segments, while the second component, the intentional structure, consists of discourse segment purposes and the relations between them. The third component, the attentional state, is an abstraction of the discourse participants’ focus of attention, and records the objects, properties, and relations that are very important at a given point in the discourse. ‘Centering‘ is an element of the local level and pertains to the interaction between the form of linguistic expression and local discourse coherence. In particular, it relates local coherence to choice of referring expression (or anaphora, such as pronouns in contrast to definite description or proper name). The term is based on the idea that differences in coherence correspond in part to the different demands for inference made by different types of referring expressions, given a particular attentional state. Hu and Haihua (2001, 5) prefer to focus on the formalisms inherent in the Centering Theory. They provide the following constraints and rules:

Cohesion and Coherence in English and Arabic

65

1- Constraints: a. There is precisely one backward-looking center Cb (Ui, D). b. Every element of the forward centers list, Cf (Ui, D), must be realized in Ui. c. The center, Cb (Ui, D), is the highest-ranked element of Cf (Ui-1, D) that is realized in Ui. 2- Rules: For each Ui in a discourse segment D consisting of utterances U1, …, Um. a. If some element of Cf (Ui-1, D) is realized as a pronoun in Ui, then so is Cb (Ui, D). b. Transition states are ordered. The CONTINUE transition is preferred to the RETAIN transition, which is preferred to the SMOOTH-SHIFT transition, which is preferred to the ROUGH-SHIFT transition. They (10) also argue that that the typology of transitions from one utterance, Ui-1, to the next utterance, Ui, is based on two factors: (a) whether the backward-looking center, Cb, is the same from Ui-1 to Ui, and (b) whether this discourse entity is the same as the preferred center, Cp, of Ui. It is clear that the model is similar to the other coherence-based models in their complexity and quantification of discourse processing. Applying de Beaugrande and Dressler’s model, we now consider the following text (available online)14. The sentences are numbered for convenience of reference: (1)The owner of a missing cat is asking for help. (2) “My baby has been missing for over a month now, and I want him back so badly,” said Mrs. Brown, a 56-year-old woman. (3) Mrs. Brown lives by herself in a trailer park near Clovis. (4)She said that Clyde, her 7-year-old cat, didn’t come home for dinner more than a month ago. (5)The next morning he didn’t appear for breakfast either. (6)After Clyde missed an extra-special lunch, she called the police. (7)When the policeman asked her to describe Clyde, she told him that Clyde had beautiful green eyes, had all his teeth but was missing half of his left ear, and was seven years old and completely white. (8)She then told the officer that Clyde was about a foot high.

14

100 Free English Short Stories for ESL & EFL Learners. Available online: http://www.rongcahng.com. Retrieved on 15/4/2008.

66

Amr M. El-Zawawy (9)A bell went off. “Is Clyde your child or your pet?” the officer suspiciously asked. (10) “Well, he’s my cat, of course,” Mrs. Brown replied. (11) “Lady, you’re supposed to report missing PERSONS, not missing CATS,” said the irritated policeman. (12) “Well, who can I report this to?” she asked. (13) “You can’t. You have to ask around your neighborhood or put up flyers,” replied the officer.”

The text is an excerpt from a long story about a missing cat. The cat is called Clyde, and its owner is called Mrs. Brown. The coherence relations to be established here depend on the ability on the part of the reader to discover that Clyde is the cat and the pet, and that in either case it has been stolen. In this case, a semantic network, based on de Beaugrande and Dressler (1981), can be drawn to illustrate the point:

Figure 8-2. A semantic network after de Beaugrande and Dressler (1981)

Clyde is perceived of as a cat, while Clyde is part of the category of pets. At the same time, a cat has its superordinate terms as ‘pet,’ which Mrs. Brown perceives of as ‘baby.’ The pet and baby are affected entities, since both refer to Clyde which has been affected by the action of stealing. This network is,

Cohesion and Coherence in English and Arabic

67

however, meant to explain the coherence relations holding among the different realizations of the pet at different textual intervals: for other coherence relations, other intricate networks are needed.

APPLYING THE CENTERING THEORY Taboada and Zabala (2008, 70-71) attempt an application of the Centering Theory on the following text: (1) a. Harry suppressed a snort with difficulty. b. The Dursleys really were astonishingly stupid about their son, Dudley. c. They had swallowed all his dim-witted lies about having tea witha different member of his gang every night of the summer holidays. d. Harry knew perfectly well that Dudley had not been to tea anywhere; e. he and his gang spent every evening vandalizing the play park. They contend that in the first utterance, (1a), there are two centers: Harry and snort. (1a) does not have a backward-looking center (the center is empty), because this is the first utterance in the discourse segment. In (1b), two new centers appear: the Dursleys and their son, Dudley. The lists include centers ranked according to two main criteria: grammatical function and linear order. The Cf list for (1b) is: Dursleys, Dudley.9 The preferred center in that utterance is the highest-ranked member of the Cf list, i. e., Dursleys. The Cb of (1b) is empty, since there are no common entities between (1a) and (1b). In (1c), a few more entities are presented. They further provide the following formulae: a. Harry suppressed a snort with difficulty. Cf: Harry, snort Cp: Harry _ Cb: Ø Transition: zero b. The Dursleys really were astonishingly stupid about their son, Dudley. Cf: Dursleys, Dudley Cp: Dursleys _ Cb: Ø Transition: zero

68

Amr M. El-Zawawy

c. They had swallowed all his dim-witted lies about having tea with a different member of his gang every night of the summer holidays. Cf: Dursleys, Dudley, lies, tea, member, gang, night, holidays Cp: Dursleys _ Cb: Dursleys Transition: continue d. Harry knew perfectly well that Dudley had not been to tea anywhere; Cf: Harry, Dudley, tea Cp: Harry _ Cb: Dudley Transition: rough shift e. he and his gang spent every evening vandalising the play park, [...] Cf: Dudley, gang, evening, park Cp: Dudley _ Cb: Dudley It is clear from their analysis that the text is not highly coherent, since the transition constraint is missing two times and only roughly detectable in the rest of occurrences.

COHERENCE AND COHESION IN ARABIC Cohesion and coherence in Arabic are located on a semantic plane. Cohesion is assigned the Arabic term ‘as-sabk,’ which is viewed by lexicographers as attempting to gather diverse parts together in a unified whole. Al-Fayrūzābādī (2005) defines as-sabk as related to the caster who casts speech into unified molds. In modern Arabic linguistics, as-sabk is considered an integral aspect of lexical cohesion. This type of cohesion is achieved through the explicit use of connectives, thus it is inherent in the formal shape of the text. Coherence is assigned the Arabic term ‘al-ḥabk.’ It means pedantry and precision. Ibn Manzūr (1981) defines al-ḥabk as related to fastening a robe. Modern accounts, especially Miftāḥ (2006), refer to both cohesion and coherence as being both derived from ‘al-iltiḥam.’ Coherence is assigned an alternative term, viz. ‘al-tansik,’ whereas cohesion is assigned ‘al-tanḍiḍ.’ However, it should be noted that al-Gurgānī (2000) locates cohesion and coherence on the poetic plane. He considers the two notions as the central drive for composing palatable poetry. He argues that lexical items are but lifeless units that require permutations and particular arrangements in order to be comprehensible. Similarly, al-Askari contends that grammatical structure is not alone sufficient for providing a coherent text: it requires collocations that

Cohesion and Coherence in English and Arabic

69

give meaning its charm. The analysis of al-Gurgānī combines the grammatical linkage and the semantics. Both of these represent the two elements of ‘cohesion’ and ‘coherence’ and the relationships among them, in addition to al-Gurgānī’s indication of the ‘intentionality’ relationship, which is considered an important standard in determining textuality (notice the affinity with de Beaugrande’s model). As Ali (2013) contends, the explanations of al-Gurgānī were not sufficient with regards to the formal side of grammar, but he also made hints that are related to linguistic validity. Further, al-Gurgānī explained some poetic examples when he presented certain issues such as (fasād annazm) ‘the corruption of composition.’ A central study of cohesion in Arabic is Blau (1977). He investigates ‘adverbial construction’ in Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. In this study, he argues that such adverbials acquire this special status by their “separation from the rest of the sentence by conjunctions and/or presentatives.” Some examples of these adverbials that Blau (1977) lists from Arabic are wa-min huna ‘thus, therefore,’ al-ann ‘now,’ ‘ala alraghm min ‘despite that,’ and fi-l-waqi’ ‘as a matter of fact.’ Al-Batal (1990, 1994) defines connectives as “any element in the text which--regardless of whether or not it belongs to the form class of conjunctions--indicates a linking or transitional relationship between phrases, clauses, sentences, and paragraphs” (1985, 2) Al-Batal (1985) invokes Halliday and Hasan‘s (1976) definition of cohesion in text, using this concept “as a general framework” for his analysis. Within this framework, “connectives” are regarded as cohesive devices which “provide an explicit surface realization (cohesion) of underlying semantic relations (coherence).” The analysis presented in his study “is based on the occurrences of connectives in one modern Arabic expository text.” Al-Batal’s (1985, 1990) interest in Arabic ‘connectives’ as important devices that require great attention and his awareness of the importance of approaching them from a discourse perspective makes his work pioneering in this area of research. His treatment of these elements and his deep insights about their contribution to “textual cohesion in Arabic writing” [have] been crucial,” as Ryding (2005, 407) points out, “to our understanding of their nature and importance.” Al-Batal (1985, 1990) describes 28 occurrences of ‘connectives‘ operating above the sentence level out of 231 occurrences of all ‘connectives.’ Other than wa ‘and,’ and fa ‘since, for, so, thus,’ the only discourse connectives in his study that could be included in the discourse markers’ group are: kazlika ‘we add to this,’ gayra ‘anna ‘however, but’ min thamma ‘thus, therefore,’

70

Amr M. El-Zawawy

thumma ‘then,’ and ‘amma fa ‘as for.’ While wa and fa occur several times in the text, there is only one occurrence of each of the rest. Another important aspect of cohesion and coherence in Arabic is the definition of the text. Az-Zannād (1993, 12) prefers to define a text as ‘a texture of words correlated with each other.’ Similarly, Biḥīrī (2005, 94) views the text as “a set of elements among which an internal network is created, attempting to achieve some sort of harmony and coherence among these elements.” These two definitions point to the pivotal role played by cohesion and coherence in forming any text in Arabic.

A SUMMARY OF RYDING’S TAXONOMY OF ARABIC CONNECTIVES Ryding defines Arabic connectives as words or phrases that connect one part of discourse with another, and link sentences within a text are referred to as discoursemarkers. She also adds that the frequent use of connectives results in a high degree of textual cohesion in Arabic writing that contrasts significantly with the terser style of written English. Moreover, different researchers classify members of these categories in different ways. At the sentence level, traditional Arabic grammarians classify particles (ḥuruuf ‫ )حروف‬according to whether or not they have a grammatical effect on the following phrase or clause. For instance, the particle kay ‫‘ كي‬in order that’ requires the following verb to be in the subjunctive mood; the negative particle lam ‫ لم‬requires the verb to be in the jussive mood; and the subordinating conjunction‘anna ‘that’ requires the subject of the following clause to be either a suffix pronoun or a noun in the accusative case. Thus the operational effect of the function word is a primary feature in its classification. The effects of these particles on the syntax and inflectional status of sentence elements form a major component in the theoretical framework and analysis of Arabic syntax. Along these lines, connectives are presented here according to whether or notthey exercise a grammatical effect on the following sentence element. In one class, there are the many connecting words that serve linking functions only, without requiring a grammatical change, called here ‘simple linking connectives.’ Ryding provides the following categories: 1. wa- ‘and’ (waaw al-’aitfih)

Cohesion and Coherence in English and Arabic

71

1.1. Sentence starter waSentences within an expository text after the introductory sentence are often initiated with wa- ‘and’ and/or another connective expression. The following examples are beginnings of typical sentences. As a sentence-starter, wa- is considered good style in Arabic, but it is not usually translated into English. The following examples well illustrate the point: ‫وغادر للقاهرة أمس مساعد الوزير‬ wa- ġaadar-a l-qaahirat-a ‘ams-i musaa’iid-u waziir. (And) the assistant minister of defense left Cairo yesterday . . . ‫ووصل الرئيسان إلى العاصمة أمس‬ wa-waṣal-a l-ra’iis-aani ‘ilaa l-fiaaṣimat-i ‘ams-i . . . (And) the two presidents arrived in the capital yesterday . . . 1.2. Coordinating conjunction waThe coordinating conjunction wa- ‘and’ is an intersentential additive that links clauses, phrases, and words. In particular, Arabic uses wa- in lists where in English a comma would be used to separate each item15. The following examples well illustrate the point: ‫منها مصر واألردن والكويت ولبنان وقطر وعمان ودولة اإلمارات العربية المتحدة والمملكة‬ ‫العربية السعودية‬ min-haa miṣr-u wa-l-’urdunn-u wa-l-kuwayt-u wa-lubnaan-u wa-qa ṭr-u wa-fiumaan-uwa-dawlat-u l-imaaraat-i l-’arabiyyat-i l-muttahidat-i wa-lmamlakat-u l-fiarabiyyat-ul-safiuudiyyat-u. Among them are Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar, Oman, the (‘State of ‘) the United Arab Emirates, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. ‫مواد أدبية ولغوية وتاريخية وفلسفية‬ mawaadd-u ‘adabiyyat-un wa-luġawiyyat-un wa-taariixiyyat-un wafalsafiyyat-un literary, linguistic, historical, and philosophical materials

15The

connective wa is considered part of the word following it, and thus becomes an integral unit of it like any letter in the word.

72

Amr M. El-Zawawy 2. fa- `inna ‘and so; and then; yet; and thus’

This connector is usually called fa’ al-isti’nafiyya or fa’ al-sababiyya. It plays several semantic roles, being indicative of sequentiality, resultativeness, contrast, and conclusion. It may start a sentence in a text or it may link elements together within a sentence. ‫فهم مازالوا مهتمين بأحداث االنتفاضة‬ fa-hum maa zaal-uu muhtamm-iina bi-’aḥdaath-i l-intifaaḍat-i. Yet they are still interested in the events of the uprising. ‫فإنه يتجاهله‬...‫وإذا لم يلغ اآلخر‬wa-’idhaa lam ya-lghi l-’aaḳar . . . fa-’inna-hu yatajaahal-u-hu. If he doesn’t abolish the other . . . (then) he ignores it. ‫فتحت الباب فانفتح‬ fataḥ-tu l-baab-a fa-nfataḥ-a I opened the door and [so] it opened. 3. Contrastive conjunctions 3.1. bal ‫‘ بل‬rather; but actually’16 The word bal is an “adversative”: it introduces a clause whose semantic content conveys the idea of something additional but also different or contrastive from the main clause. ‫وترجمت هذه الكتب إلى الالتينية بل كتب معظمها بالحروف العبرية‬ wa-turjim-at haadhihi l-kutub-u ‘ilaa l-laatiiniyyat-i bal kutib-a mufiḍamu-haabi-ḥuruuf-in ‘iibriyyat-in. These books were translated into Latin, but [actually] they were mostly written in Hebrew script (‘letters’). ‫ليس في األمر ثمة صقور أو حمام بل هناك توزيع واسع لألدوار‬ lays-a fii l-’amr-i thammat-a Suquur-un ‘aw Hamaa’im-u bal hunaaka tawziifi-unwaasi’i-un li-l-’adwaar-i.

16'Wa’

in classical Arabic cannot follow ‘Bal.’

Cohesion and Coherence in English and Arabic

73

There are in the matter neither hawks nor doves, but rather there is a wide distribution of roles. 3.2. ‘inna-maa ‫ إنما‬wa-’inna-maa ‫‘ وإنما‬but; but moreover; but also, rather’ This connective word has both confirmational and contrastive components to its meaning. ‫لم تكن تسجيال فقط وإنما هوانعكاس لواقع اجتماعي‬ lam ta-kun tasjiil-an faqaT wa-’inna-maa huwa in’iikaas-un li-l-waaq’i-i l-ijtimaa’iiyy-i. It was not only documentation, but moreover a reflection of social reality. 4. Explanatory conjunctions 4.1. ‘ay ‫‘ أي‬that is, i.e.’ This small word is an explicative particle equivalent to the Latin abbreviations i.e., and viz. ‫ كلما هو واقعي‬،‫أي‬ ‘ay, kull-u maa huwa waaqi’iiyy-un that is, everything that is real 5. Resultative conjunctions 5.1. ‘iḏ ‫‘ إذ‬since’; ‘inasmuch as’ This small word is a resultative particle that introduces a clause providing areas on for the main clause, but has a time to it and is usually considered a variant of ‘iḏa ‫إذا‬. ‫حقق الحزب الحاكم نصرا ساحقا على منافسه إذ حصل على معظم المقاعد‬ ḥaqqaq-a l- ḥizb-u l-jumhuuriyy-u l- ḥaakim-u na ṣr-an saa ḥiq-an ‘ialaa munaafis-ii-hi ‘iḏḥaṣal-a fialaa mufi ḏam-i l-maqaa’iid-i. The ruling republican party realized an overwhelming victory over its opponents since it obtained most of the seats. 5.2. ‘iḏan ‫( إذا‬spelled with nuun) and ‘iḏ-an ‫( إذن‬spelled with nunation) ‘therefore; then; so; thus; in that case’

74

Amr M. El-Zawawy

This connective word initiates a clause or question that comes as a result or conclusion from a previous statement. In informal style, it may also come at the end of the clause. The two variants refer to different rules. ‘iḏan ‫ إذا‬occurs without pause following it, while ‘iḏan ‫ إذن‬should be followed by a short pause. ‫إذا هناك منهجان‬...‫إذا لماذا يتوجب علينا‬ ‘iḏan li-maadhaa ya-tawajjab-u ‘ialay-naa . . . ‘iḏan hunaaka manhajaani . . . Then why do we have to . . . Thus, there are two methods . . . 5.3 ḥattaa ‫ حتى‬past tense: ‘until’ When ḥattaa is followed by a past tense verb, it introduces a clause that shows a result of the previous clause. When used before a noun, it refers to a place or locative. ‫ولم تزل في النمو حتى أصبحت من أهم المدن في المنطقة‬ wa-lam ta-zul fii l-namuww-i ḥattaa’a ṣbaḥ-at min ‘ahamm-i mudun-i lminṭqat-i. It kept growing until it became [one] of the most important cities of the region. ‫أكلت السمكة حتى رأسها‬ ‘akalutu al-samakata ḥattaa ra’saha I ate the fish to its head. 6. Adverbial conjunctions 6.1. Adverbial conjunctions of place: ḥayth-u ‫‘ حيث‬where’ It is extensively used for place. It alsohas non-locative meanings when used with other particles, such as min ḥayth-u ‘regarding; as for’ or bi-ḥayth-u ‘so that; so as to’or ḥaythu-ma ‘wherever.’ ‫في كلية حيث تدرس حيث القديم يختلط مع الحديث‬ fii kulliyyat-in ḥayth-u tu-darris-u ḥayth-u l-qadiim-u yaḳtaliṭ-u ma’i-a lḥadiith-i

Cohesion and Coherence in English and Arabic

75

in a college where she teaches where the old mixes with the new. ‫افعل الخير حيثما كنت‬ ‘ifa ‘al al-khayr ḥaythuma kunt. Do charitable deeds wherever you are. 6.2. Adverbial conjunctions of time These adverbials provide information on the time of the action or temporal contrast, and are traditionally called zuruf. The two particles ma and ‘iḏin are suffixed to some of them. 6.2.1. bayn-a-maa ‫‘ بينما‬while; whereas’ ‫ضبطوا بينما كانوا يستهلكون المخدر‬ ḍubiṭ-uu bayn-a-maa kaan-uu ya-stahlik-uuna l-muḳaddir-a. They were arrested while they were consuming the drug. ‫فكانت الثقافة العربية رسمسة بينما ظلت الالتينية العامية لغة الناس‬ fa-kaan-at-i l-thaqaafat-u l-’arabiyyat-u rasmiyyat-an bayn-a-maa ḏallat-i l-laatiiniyyat-ul-fiaammat-u lughat-an li-l-naas-i. Arabic culture was official whereas vernacular Latin remained a language of the people. 6.2.2. ba’id-a-maa ‫‘ بعدما‬after’ As Ryding cautions, this connective is usually followed directly by a past tense verb. Note that the preposition ba’id-a’after’ can be followed only by a noun or pronoun; it is necessary to use ba’id-a-maa before a clause beginning with a verb. ‫بعدما شاهد أحد المارة بعدما وقعت على الثلج‬ ba’id-a-maa shaahad-a-hu ‘aḥad-u l-maarrat-i ba’id -a-maa waqa’-at ‘alaa l-thalj-i after one of the passers-by saw him after she fell on the ice 6.2.3. ba’id -a-’idin ‫‘ بعدئذ‬after that; then; subsequently’

76

Amr M. El-Zawawy This compound expression is equivalent in most situations to the adverbial conjunction thumma: ‫وبعدئد انتقل إلى بيت كريم‬ wa- ba’id -a-’idin -i ntaqal-a ‘ilaa daar-i kariim-in. After that he moved to Karim’s house.

6.2.4. ḥiin-a-maa ‫‘ حينما‬when; at the time when’ ‫لكن األزمة نشبت حينما عرقلت الشرطة دخول الطالب‬ laakinna l-’azmat-a nashab-at ḥiin-a-maa ‘arqal-at-i l-shurṭat-u duḳuul-a l-ḳullaab-i But the crisis broke out when the police obstructed the entrance of students. 6.2.5. ‘ind-a-maa ‫‘ عندما‬when; at the time when’ ‫عندما جئنا إلى هنا عندما تقدمنا في العمر‬ ‘ind-a-maa ji’naa ‘ilaa hunaa ‘ind-a-maa ta-taqaddam-u fii l-’umr-i when we came here when they grew older (‘advance in age’) 6.2.6. ‘ind-a -’idin ‫‘ عندئذ‬then; at that point in time; at that time’ ‫والبد عندئذ من طرح قضية االنسحاب‬ wa laa budd-a ‘ind-a -’idin min ṭarḥ-i qaḍiyyat-i l-insiHaab. Rejection of the issue of withdrawal was inevitable at that point. 6.2.7. thumm-a ‫‘ ثم‬then; and then; subsequently’ This connective points to an action that occurs at a relatively longer interval of time. ‫ثم ضعها في صندوق‬ thumm-a ḍa’-haa fii Sanduuq-in. Then put it in a box later. Ryding then introduces adverbials of similarity, which are not strictly connectives, since they can be used without particular rules. They include ‫مثلما‬ and ‫حسبما‬. 7. Disjunctives

Cohesion and Coherence in English and Arabic

77

There are two main disjunctives in Arabic possessing the same function as English ones, viz. ‫‘ أو‬aw and ‫‘ أم‬am. The two are not interchangeable. The first ‫‘أو‬aw is used without a preceding hamza in the clause. Consider the following example: ‫لنجاح الحزب الحاكم أو فشله‬ li-najaa ḥ-i l- ḥizb-i l- ḥaakim-i ‘aw fashl-i-hi for the success of the ruling party or its failure. The sentence does not start with interrogative like hamza. As for ‫‘ أم‬am, consider the following example: ‫الأدري أأشرب أم أأكل‬ La-’adri ‘a’ashrab ‘am ‘a’akul I do not know whether to drink or eat. The sentence is fronted with an interrogative-like hamza. The use of ‫‘ أو‬aw in this context is not appropriate. It is important to note that the use of ‫إما‬ ‘imma necessitates, on the other hand, the insertion of ‫‘ أو‬aw rather than ‫‘ أم‬am. Consider the following example: ‫إما أن تشرب أو تأكل‬ ‘imma ‘an tashrab ‘awta’kul Either you drink or eat. 8.3.1. Topic shift: ‘amma. . . fa- ‘as for . . .’ Topic-shift is usually signaled by ‘amma, which is roughly equivalent to English ‘as for’ or ‘as to.’ This expression occurs sentence initially, and the other clause in the same sentence starts with ‘fa.’ ‫أما القسم المترجم فمتنوع جدا‬

‘ammal-qism-u l-mutarjam-u fa-mutanawwa’i-un jidd-an. As for the translated part, it is very diverse. 8.3.2. Addition: ‘alaa daalika ‫’على ذلك‬in addition to that; moreover; furthermore…’ ‫على ذلك أكد الصحفي‬

‘ilaa daalika ‘akkad-a l- ṣaḥaafiyy-u . . .

78

Amr M. El-Zawawy Moreover, the journalist affirmed . . . . . . ‫على ذلك استمرت قوات االحتالل في العمليات‬

‘ilaa daalika stamarr-at quwwat-u l-iḥtilaal-i fii ‘amaliyyaat-in . . . In addition to that, the occupation forces continued operations . . .

COMPARING THE TWO LANGUAGES From the elaborate discussions above, it becomes clear that English and Arabic operate differently in their cohesion and coherence subsystems. English enjoys a wealth of studies on cohesive devices and the diverse relations coherence can exhibit in written discourse. Arabic, in contrast, suffers from a dearth of studies done in the field. The traditionalists, albeit wryly aware of the differences that obtain between cohesion and coherence, confine most of their discussions to the realm of poetry. The studies by Al-Batal (1985, 1990, and 1994) are the only sources to depend on the investigation of cohesion, and are not systematically refined in the same way those on English are. Even Ryding‘s reclassification does not point to the fact that listing is used rather than categorization on the basis of semantic analysis. Semi-computational models of coherence, especially de Beaugrande’s and Grozs,’ also give English coherence studies a decisive edge. This renders the comparison between English and Arabic in terms of coherence rather difficult due to the lack of relevant academic studies.

PART TWO: STYLISTICS INTRODUCTION This part is mainly concerned with select studies on stylistics from a comparative perspective. The essays presented here point to the two prominent traditions of verse in English and Arabic. Although the poems dealt with are not epitomes of the two traditions, they are, for those deeply interested in comparative literature and stylistics, as stimulating as any thriving comparison in the field. The present studies are meant to bring to the fore the points of comparison that duly give English poetry its right without forfeiting the grandeur of Arabic poetry. In this part, I have been battening down the hatches, so to say. The studies span a range of poets ancient and modern, whose poetry furnished the necessary tool kit for a theoretical set of assumptions. In the course of these comparisons, their poetry has been subjected to evaluation and has been given a new lease of stylistic life. For example, Al-Ma’arri’s and Herbert’s poetry is discussed herein with a view to their philosophy, religious or otherwise, and Weltanschauung. Although both poets can at first sight be thought of as moving in opposite directions—with one shrouding his life in utter gloom and excessive pessimism, while the other luxuriating in the joys of life, then amending itself later—they exhibit a noticeable stylistic affinity. Both poets take into account the ‘implied reader’ (Iser’s term) who is supposed to comprehend and even apprehend the meaning of meaning. Thus both aim at addressing a ‘superreader’ (Rifaterre’s term), and force ‘literary repertoire’ to take precedence over other easily perceptible denotations. Another example is Al-Shaby’s poetry, which addresses many issues and trends which baffle critics. It is difficult to venture on a comprehensive reassessment of Al-

80

Amr M. El-Zawawy

Shaby’s poetry, because the fact is that his lines are passion-loaded and highly poetical. In his verse, what appears first as a tone of desperation turns out to be a vociferous call for optimism. More baffling still, the titles of his poems are reminiscent of certain emotions, much of which are pertinent to special undertones. Two seminal stylistic notions are introduced in the present studies, namely overtones and undertones. English dictionaries define an ‘overtone‘ as something ‘harmonic.’ They also define an ‘undertone’ as ‘subdued tone.’ The two definitions point to important facts: first, it is harmony which best characterizes an overtone because overtones represent the feature which meets the reader’s eyes so readily that he/she may deem it the dominating force behind the literary work. Second, the ‘subdued tone’ is what appears later on, in the course of meditation, and may affect, nimbly notwithstanding, the interpretation of the literary work. This apparent dichotomy is particularly clear in Al-Mala’ika’s poetry. What is suggested by the undertones is concurrently echoed in the overtones, which, if counted upon in the very beginning, may be misleading, though they, by way of circumlocution, might reveal a vestige of the strident undertones. Thus, Nazik Al-Mala’ika’s poetry is too subtle to guess at or interpret at face value. Her poems verge on confessional poetry, then suddenly, on a second reading, turn out to be impersonal. It is that dilemma which has called for a double-standard treatment—namely, the sharp distinction between overtones and undertones. It is also the same dilemma that has necessitated deep examination of other poems, though belonging to different poetic trends, as well as other poetic structures. As a translator of sorts, I have tried to project the complex image. The poems quoted here are carefully chosen and translated. They depict how close the two cultures of English and Arabic are, and how, in translation, Arabic poetry seems to be no less powerful and interesting than English poetry. No drastic modifications in length or imagery have thus been affected, and, sometimes literal notwithstanding, the translated versions are an attempt to separate the sheep from the goats. Their language may sound a little archaic and loaded, but they are still acceptable. It is inescapable, however, that some have necessitated prosaic translations, since they stand untranslatable to a great extent. This short introduction is just for elaborating the above points. Now let us go to the studies.

Chapter 9

AL-MA’ARRI AND HERBERT: A DEHISTORICIZED HERMENEUTICAL APPROACH INTRODUCTION A critical examination of both Abul Alaa’ Al-Ma’arri’s and George Herbert’s17 poetry may seem at first intimidating, but delving into the ingenuity of the two poets, one can explore dimensions where exceptionality is no more than common territory. With his excessive pessimism and genuine philosophical results, Al-Ma’arri seems to be more European than Arabic, and it is that ramification which has characterized him as similar to English poets, especially those concerned with co-mingling religious undertones with secular issues. It is also this ramification which makes him more akin to the Metaphysical poets with their quasi-logic and ‘hyper-philosophization.’ Not 17Abul

Alaa' Al-Ma'arri (973-1058) was a Syrian poet of great renown. He was not born sightless, but lost vision inearly childhood due to smallpox. He first set out as a poetaster in Baghdad, but to no avail. Depressed by his failure, he soon developed literary genius and distinguished himself as a professed ascetic and pessimist. He never married and even claimed misogyny. His poetry has always been classified as a leap towards modernism. He stands out amongst other Arab poets, ancientand modern, by his Luzumiyyat, where he imposed upon himself strict rules of rhyme and rhythm. His poetry is also characterized by pungent criticisms of hypocrisy and superstitions and some later poems are considered by orthodox Muslims to be almost heretical (cf. Dudley and Lang, 1969). George Herbert (1593-1633) was an English poet and clergyman. In 1609, he moved from Westminster to Trinity College, Cambridge. He started as a court favorite (during James's reign), but his religious poetry marked a sudden change to the Church. He took holy orders and spent the rest of his life as an ardent religious poet. His collection The Temple encompasses almost all his poetry (cf. Chambers Biographical Dictionary, 1984).

82

Amr M. El-Zawawy

that Al-Ma’arri is similar to the whole lot of Metaphysicals: rather, he does not retain the frivolity of John Donne, or the affected aura of Thomas Traherne: he is an austere poet analyzing life as best as a pessimist and misogynist can. Chief among the austere Metaphysicals is George Herbert, who, taking holy orders, ventures on borrowing the style prevalent in the Bible to his poetic advantage, thus figuring as more prone to be on a par with Al-Ma’arri, who, influenced by the inimitability of the Qur’an, tries to fall back on the early meanings of lexical items. It may be appropriate to state in this respect that the present study aims at discussing the logic adopted by both Al-Ma’arri and Herbert in the light of the hermeneutic approach with little or no emphasis on the historical aspect of their verse. Not only that: other critical investigations shall be made into the nature of the poetry of the two.

A Hermeneutical Tour De Force In ‘Companions Gone’ by Al-Ma’arri, there is an unmistakable tone of imminence and death-succumb. The call of fate to the speaker to ‘move’ is unclear, and the awareness of how death equates all mortals is even difficult to condone. The poem, like many other ones, can be analyzed hermeneutically according to the distinction proposed by Maclean (1986). The ‘noesis’ (Husserl’s term, 1982) of Al-Ma’arri is echoed through the speaker. He is getting the reader swept about by attacking him/her by his intention—which is the analysis of life with a constant eye on the verity of death. Although the theory of Husserl has been castigated by many for its emphasis on the difficult-to-prove intentionality of the poet or the writer, it is safe enough to apply it here because Al-Ma’arri is a confessed pessimist upon his word: That is what my father has done to me, And I have done harm to nobody!18

Yet Ingarden’s approach (in Maclean, ibid) is also applicable. His Unbestimmtheitsstellen (i.e., ‘spots of indeterminacy’) is no more than an analysis of phonetic formations, meaning units, schematized aspects and represented objectivities. As for the poem mentioned above, it is the phonetic formations which characterize it as unique. The insistence on the same rhythm 18All

the translations of the excerpts from Al-Ma'arri's poetry are attempted by the author.

Al-Ma’arri and Herbert

83

and rhyme scheme emphasizes how life has become all too boring and unbearable for the speaker, and proves Husserl’s point about ‘noesis’ and ‘noema.’ Al-Ma’arri adopts a structure reminiscent of the architectonics of Herbert in ‘The Pulley’: meaning is thus broken down into units mostly monologic. Both schematized aspects and represented objectivities are then ‘intended’ to provide the world of the text. Both Al- Ma’arri and Herbert share the last two ‘objects’ (Ingarden’s term), and the speakers usually address fate or a superhuman power. However, the above analysis miserably overlooks the personal circumstances of both poets. Born sightless and prone to abominate women and flesh, Al-Ma’arri distinguishes himself as a poet driven by personal tendencies, even similar to Herbert’s dabbling in religion: the latter seems to be, at times, a skeptic like Al-Ma’arri, and discloses his inner revolt in ‘The Collar’: I struck the board, and cry’d, No more: I will abroad. Al-Ma’arri also concurs in ‘I know Not’: As to bodies, in dust are their tombs, And souls I know not their rooms!

However, Herbert starts a skeptic then ends a pious man, but Al-Ma’arri topples the process over, and usually ends a shrewd skeptic as in ‘O Tomorrow’: Thy fear of God is a provision, So believe it to be the best in thy water-skin. How wholesome death is for its quaffer, If the dead will soon get together.

Such awareness of the flashing doubt of Herbert and the cynical credulity of Al-Ma’arri accords well with the Geneva School’s revival of the ‘authorial consciousness.’ The emphasis on the recurrent leitmotifs in both poets is thus mandatory. In Al-Ma’arri’s verse, there is always a mention of the cycle of life and death as well as concrete objects and animals. In ‘The Truth,’ for instance, there is an unswerving attitude towards man’s destiny—viz. death and decay. Yet what is amazing is the question beyond death itself: As for truth, ‘tis that I will pass, And only God knows what I shall face.

84

Amr M. El-Zawawy

Herbert also ventures into the unknown but only inside his own imagination (cf. ‘The Flower’): Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart Could have recover’d greennesse? It was gone Quite under ground; as flowers depart To see their mother-root, when they have blown; Where they together All the hard weather, Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

DICTION, TRADITION AND CULTURE Both poets take into account the ‘implied reader’ (Iser’s term, 1980) who is supposed to comprehend and even apprehend the meaning of meaning. Thus both aim at addressing a ‘superreader’ (Rifaterre’s term, 1983), and forces ‘literary repertoire’ to take precedence over other easily perceptible denotations. Al-Ma’arri’s reference to objects is a case in point. He mentions the grave as the last resting place, and fraternizes with a blind man’s staff. In this particular way, he echoes the verses of the Qur’an in many of his poems, and Paret (1983) has been much in the right to notice that: “It was also reported of a skeptic and writer of the fifth/eleventh century, the blind Abu’l-Ala al-Ma’arri who died in 449/1057, that he tried to produce an imitation of the Qur’an. The accusation refers to his compendious work al-Fusul wa-’l-ghayat, only the first seventh of which has survived, a supreme example of the art of poetry and rhyme that was based on the classical Arabic literary language, and of which the author was a master. It is written in elaborate rhyming prose, and individual sections of stanzas occasionally open with archaic oaths such as: “ I swear by him who created horses and yellowish-white [camels] who lope along in al-Ruhayl… These incantations are reminiscent of early Qur’anic texts” (213).

Other examples than mentioned above occur in ‘ The Loyal Staff,’ where the language of the Qur’an is easily recalled: If sin changes faces, aye, Then ye will behold in doomsday

Al-Ma’arri and Herbert

85

People’s sullen, pale—black, nay! If Mind guides them to the right way, Into the wrong one they Are goaded by their natures smoothly!

The last three lines, on the other hand, bring to the mind the noble verse 256 in ‘Al-Baqara’ (the second chapter in the Qur’an). Thus it is clear that Al-Ma’arri’s diction draws upon sources deeply rooted in the Arabic tradition. He refers to objects and animals, being affected by the grandeur of the Holy Qur’an. In a similar vein, Herbert attempts an imitation of the language of the Bible, especially in ‘The Pulley’: When God at first made man, Having a glasse of blessings standing by; Let us (said he) poure on him all we can; Let the worlds riches, which dispersed lie, Contract into a span.

However, Austin (1996) suggests that Herbert’s diction is generally colloquial. The examples quoted by her include words such as ‘snudge,’ ‘jogs,’ ‘gad,’ etc. More extremist still, Wadia (2001)19 states that ‘The Pulley’ is mainly derived from the myth of Zeus, who gave Pandora a box containing Hope and other miserable paraphernalia. Warned not to open it, Pandora grew more inquisitive and violated the promise, causing the release of numberless epidemics and misfortunes to befall the world. Only Hope was the best object. Nevertheless, this is not the dictum, and although viewed with doubt by many, it proves that Herbert’s verse has roots deeper in time than the Bible itself: the very idea evidences once more the validity of the ‘literary repertoire’ proposed by Iser.

ARGUMENTATION AND STRUCTURE: TIMELESSNESS IN A NEW KEY The above interpretation may also serve as proof of Gadamer’s model (1977), where classicism is combined with timelessness. It seems that Herbert, 19Wadia's

view is based on her understanding of the relationship between mythology and poetry, which is not to be disregarded in any act of interpretation.

86

Amr M. El-Zawawy

like Al-Ma’arri, is eager to hinge upon sources remoter in time and supremely nobler in nature than his own poetry in order to achieve timelessness. As Gadamer himself believes, timeless works of literature continue to hold court because their ‘universality’ renders them able to continue to fascinate us in the present. By introducing that remark, Gadamer fuses historicism into literary criticism, and this is clear in Al- Ma’arri’s emphasis on analyzing the root nature of life and death and what lies beyond them. Al-Ma’arri thus ventures on topics of timeless value such as the consecutive cycle of life, the unimportance of worldly gains, and the extravagance of the rich despite their short lives. Likewise, Herbert emphasizes the inexorable end of all mortals in ‘Mortification’ and the need to emerge clean out of grievous sins. In brief, timelessness is skillfully manipulated to defy extinction through reiteration or exhausted anxiety of influence. To achieve a fresh view of what they tackle, both poets further clothe their poetry in a shroud of argumentation and ‘hyper-philosophization.’ Here Ricour’s revival of the ‘hermeneutical arc’ can be invoked. As explicated by Maclean (see 3 below), the arc starts with a ‘naïve understanding of the whole of the text’; then it proceeds to hypotheses or assumptions based on semantic proofs in the text at issue. Finally, the meaning of the text is ‘actualized’ (i.e., ‘blanks’ are concretized or accounted for) by pseudo-reference through entering upon the ‘world of the text.’ A concrete example is Al-Ma’arri’s ‘The Truth,’ where the beginning is nothing but the usual comment on the destination of all human beings: As for truth, ‘tis that I will pass, And only God knows what I shall face.

By taking the poem to mean the vainglory of life, the reader exercises a naïve understanding. What sustains that comprehension is the rest of the poem, where day and night are thought to be imperishable, and the speaker’s personal experiences are connected to the brevity of life. However, assumptions may be made with the recurrence of types of animals and celestial objects. A good leading question to ask is that: why does Al- Ma’arri choose such types in particular? Black bile, horses, meteors, isthmus, mistletoes, etc. figure clearly in the poem, and are further related to the idea of life itself. ‘Blanks’ of this type can be then actualized by assuming that Al-Ma’arri is intent on creating a world of objectivity out of subjectivity for his text. In a sense, although the whole poem centers around one speaker whose experiences and feelings are exposed almost lyrically, there are other objects which are, nevertheless,

Al-Ma’arri and Herbert

87

invoked in order to vindicate the nature of the theme—that is, death. As such, a black bile is made to be the wife of the speaker, and a bird is encaged like a soul to be released sooner or later. It is the ‘world of the text’ which thus necessitates the grouping of such objects, living and non-living, at the same time. Herbert also creates a world for his texts. Like the other Metaphysical poets, he opts for the conceit as a vent. In ‘Life,’ for example, flowers are employed as a starting point; then the very heart of the speaker intervenes. A tacit analogy is drawn between the speaker’s heart and the flowers. Their smell is afterwards brought to the fore as a symbol of good deeds: …Since if my scent be good, I care not if It be as Short as yours.

Yet the pseudo-logic of the poem proves to be more persistent: the ‘scent’ may also mean life, the very title name of the poem. Moreover, describing the manner in which flowers die as ‘most cunningly’ may be ambivalent. The adverb may be either deceitfulness of flowers (i.e., their deception of the speaker) or the rapidity through which life ‘steals away.’ As such, the poem conforms to the ‘hermeneutical arc,’ and then creates a world where more than one actualization can be attained. Then same bewilderment can also be detected in Al-Ma’arri’s ‘Companions Gone,’ especially in the last three lines, where the passage of time is framed inside a laudatory mould: Then, can we clap hands For the changing night, and Our claps be heard On our chord?

The very question topples over, as I have previously stated, the themehorizon. Is the speaker weary of the world or prone to stick to it? Answers are never easy. What augments the depth of analysis here is the monologic structure. AlMa’arri seems to be addressing himself all the time, and, when addressing another, thrusts his own skepticism mid-way. In other poems, the reverse happens, and in both cases, the ‘horizon of expectations’ (Jauss’s term) is transcended easily: the reader’s first readings are usually ironized. In ‘O

88

Amr M. El-Zawawy

Tomorrow,’ for instance, the prevalent tone of piety and didactic surrender is set at naught in the last line, as is the case in line 36 of ‘The Truth.’ In Herbert’s verse, a similar technique is detected. In ‘Mortification,’ the last two lines are shrouded in an atmosphere of obscurantism: Yet Lord, instruct us so to die, That all these dyings may be life in death.

In ‘The Flower,’ too, another simulacrum is administered: And now in age I bud again, After so many deaths I live and write…

However, Clarke (1997) believes that Herbert’s poetry is constructed around a dialogic rather than monologic structure: “Eventually, all voices in a written dialogic discourse collapse into one rhetorical and typographical surface. Herbert is all too aware of that no external voice actually intrudes into his poetry: at least, if it does, it speaks in his own familiar accent.” (186)

She thus takes it to be dialogic on the surface, but monologic at heart. That is there is a dialogic construction, yet it is no more than affected voices of the same speaker.

CONCLUSION To conclude, both Al-Ma’arri and Herbert are almost similar. They partake of the prevalent tradition, and attempt timelessness, though on a narrow scale. Their poems seem to have no more than their Weltanschauung which eventually turns into Weltschmerz: their speakers have a clear ‘world view,’ but they soon melt into the strictures they aim at their readers. In this respect, their verse does not escape didacticism, though Herbert’s is less so. Their arguments may also appear heated at times.

Chapter 10

INTRODUCING THE STYLISTIC NOTIONS OVERTONES AND UNDERTONES 1: NAZIK AL-MALAI’KA’S POETRY INTRODUCTION Studies on Nazik Al-Mala’ika’s poetry20 are fragmented and do not reach sufficient depths. Khulusi (1950) wrote two articles published in Islamic Review (40-45) and the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (149-107) entitled “Contemporary Poetesses of Iraq.” A large section of the article is devoted to Nazik Al-Mala’ika, where he suggested a number of influences such as those of the Emigrant Literature (Arab-American), John Keats, D.H. Lawrence, and Mahmud Hasan Isma’il on her work. Altoma considers Khulusi the first critic to refer [in a Western publication] to Al-Mala’ika’s departure from the traditional two-hemistich system and her adoption of the foot as a rhythmic unit. Ahmed, in one essay, referred to Nazik Al-Mala’ika as one of the preeminent poets (1956, 164). His second essay cited excerpts from AlMala’ika’s poem, “The Hidden Land.” In 1959, the French writer Rossi published an article titled, “Impressions sur la Poesie d’Irak. Jawahiri, Mardan,

Al-Mala’ika (1923 –2007) was an Iraqi female poet . She was born in Baghdad to a mother who was a poet, and a father who was a teacher. She graduated in 1944 from the College of Arts in Baghdad and later completed a master's degree in comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin in 1959, and she was appointed professor at Baghdad University, the University of Basra, and Kuwait.

20Nazik

90

Amr M. El-Zawawy

Nazik Al-Mala’ika, Bayati,” where he translated her poem “To Wash Away Dishonor” into French. Altoma views the year 1961 as witnessing several attempts to introduce Nazik Al-Mala’ika in the West. Monteil (1961) includes in his Anthologie Bilingue de la litterature arabe contemporaine both the French and the Arabic texts of Al-Mala’ika’s poem “Five Songs for Pain.” In addition, Stewart, who was also Al-Mala’ika’s professor, touches her poetry in his essay “Contacts with Arab Writers” (1961). Altoma, in a lecture at the Women’s Club of the Pen Association in Washington, D.C., viewed Nazik Al-Mala’ika as the most prominent poetess in the Arab World, referring to the rebellion, perplexity, and melancholy that saturated her poetry. Yet these studies cannot be considered adequate if Nazik Al-Mala’ika is to be justly judged. They ignore the comparative streaks that willy-nilly permeate her poetry. By referring to Keats or Arab Emigrant Literature, they are oblivious to the Western nature of her poetry which further makes her akin in themes and imagery to Tennyson’s21 fairytale world (as shall be explained below) and Shakespeare’s elegies. Nazik Al-Malai’ka’s poetry is the corollary of a prodigy (being a child-poet who composed verse at the age of seven) and a highly educated woman. Despite her exceptional ability as a poet, she won insufficient acclaim, not being a poet of the wide public (cf. Dictionary of Oriental Literatures, 1974). The problem with Nazik Al-Mala’ika’s poems is that they more often than not verge on confessional poetry, then suddenly, on a second reading, turn out to be impersonal. It is that dilemma which has called for a double-standard treatment—namely, the sharp distinction between overtones and undertones. It is also the same dilemma that has necessitated a profound look into other poems, though belonging to different poetic trends, as well as other poetic structures. As such, it is the aim of the present study to reach a seeming Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, (1809 –1892) was Poet Laureate of Great Britain during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular British poets. Tennyson was first a student of Louth Grammar School for four years (1816–1820) and then attended Scaitcliffe School, Englefield Green and King Edward VI Grammar School, Louth. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1827, where he joined a secret society called the Cambridge Apostles. At Cambridge, Tennyson met Arthur Henry Hallam and William Henry Brookfield, who became his closest friends. His first publication was a collection of "his boyish rhymes and those of his elder brother Charles" entitled Poems by Two Brothers published in 1827. Tennyson excelled at short lyrics, such as "Break, Break, Break," "The Charge of the Light Brigade," "Tears, Idle Tears" and "Crossing the Bar." Tennyson also wrote some notable blank verse including Idylls of the King, "Ulysses," and "Tithonus." During his

21Alfred

career, Tennyson attempted drama, but his plays enjoyed little success.

Introducing the Stylistic Notions Overtones and Undertones 1

91

accommodation between the two extremes: a balance has to be struck, so to say, between the overtones, the apparent or surface intertextual references, and the philosophy which permeates the poems investigated here.

EXPLORING THE STYLISTIC NOTIONS ‘OVERTONES’ AND ‘UNDERTONES’ English dictionaries define an ‘overtone’ as something ‘harmonic.’ They also define an ‘undertone’ as ‘subdued tone.’ The two definitions point to important facts: first, it is harmony which best characterizes an overtone, just because overtones represent the feature which meets the reader’s eyes so readily that he/she may deem it the dominating force behind the literary work. Second, the ‘subdued tone’ is what appears later on, in the course of lucubration or meditation, and may affect, nimbly notwithstanding, the interpretation of the literary work. With the two ‘tones’ collaborating, the poem, any poem, comes to be recognized as ‘poetic.’ However, the distinction made earlier should not imply that there is, all the way through, a rigid dichotomy exemplified by form and content. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms is very specific about the term ‘form’: “Either the general type or the unique structure of a literary work. When used synonymously with general type, or genre, it refers to the categories according to which literary works are commonly classified…and may imply a set of conventions related to a particular genre. Form can also be used generally to refer to rhyme or patterns, metrical arrangements, and so forth… The term is often used more specifically, however, to refer to the singular structure of a particular work; in this case, form involves the arrangement of component parts, such as the sequence of events, parallelism, or some other organizational principle” (131-132).

The last phrase is the stepping-stone: it clearly distinguishes between the overtones and undertones of a literary work: parallelism is, to some extent, similar to the overtone, while the ‘organizational principle’ is well-nigh the undertone. Thus, form comprises the overtones and undertones which have the interplay of effects that renders a work literary. They refer to something more profound than just the content.

92

Amr M. El-Zawawy

By rethinking our first statement above, we can say that confessional poetry (aka Romantic poetry) has the advantage of departing from the rigidification of form in its crude sense: rhythmic patterns usually preside over and even drown out rhyme patterns, resulting in what are recognized as crossgenres. Nazik Al-Mala’ika’s poetry may be cast in that queer but recurrent mould which lays stress on certain emotional cataclysms. Thus, her poetry verges on the two types of tones.

UNDERTONES Let us start with the undertones. What attracts anyone’s attention in discussing her poetry is the fact that she focuses on alien subject-matters. Nazik Al-Malai’ka’s poetry resembles, in that particular aspect, the Arabic ‘Emigrant Literature.’ In one of his poems, Abu Madi, a renowned emigrant poet, seems to be questioning his identity and existence insofar as Nazik AlMala’ika wraps her poem ‘I Am’ in mystique. Abu Madi’s speaker is baffled: I came, I know not whence, yet came this way; I saw a path—along it made my way; I must go on—or say I yea or nay! How have I come? How did I find the way? I do not know.

This typically reminds the reader of Al-Malai’ka’s: The night asks me who I am. I am its impenetrable black, its unquiet secret Its lull rebellious. I veil myself with silence Wrapping my heart with doubt Solemnly, I gaze While ages ask me who I am.

While Abu Madi sees that it is difficult to unravel the mystery of man’s existence, Al-Mala’ika interestingly tries to redefine that existence; and by so doing, she redefines man’s identity along with the identity of a poet. The following stanza from ‘I Am’ shows this obviously:

Introducing the Stylistic Notions Overtones and Undertones 1

93

The wind asks me who I am Its bedeviled spirit. I am denied by Time, going nowhere I am journey on and on Passing without a pause And when reaching an edge I think it may be the end Of suffering, but then: the void.

What is at work here is the idea that man feels lost: he/she is torn because of the multifarious and emotive moments they experience. Moreover, in the case of the poet (being an inherent part of the human community), there is always an attempt at transcending the concept of time through poetry—the same notion Shakespeare has explored in one of his sonnets: So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Undoubtedly, ‘this’ refers to Shakespeare’s poetry or sonnets, and the same idea reverberates in Al-Shaby’s lines: Here, inside my heart, deep, roomy, Death and spectra dance! Here, the horrors of nights blow fiercely; Here flutter dreams flowery. Here call the echoes of dying! Here is played the immortality composition.

Al-Shaby means by the ‘immortality composition’ of his poetry, as the quoted lines belong to a poem called ‘The Bard’s Heart.’ The idea of undertones also incorporates the hidden effects of other poems on Al-Mala’ika’s poems. She typically lives through her poetry like Shakespeare’s beloved. Moreover, her ‘Moon Tree,’ a lengthy poem full of effusions clad in story form, is reminiscent of Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shalott.’ It may be enlightening, therefore, to zoom in on the two poems in order to discover the ‘comparative undertones.’ In the ‘Lady of Shalott,’ Tennyson portrays a very queer, imaginary world, full of barley and verdure. But, upstream lies a strange island that contains a tower in which the Lady of Shalott, a fairy, dwells secure. She is

94

Amr M. El-Zawawy

prohibited by a curse to peep out of the tower; and to passher time, she continues to weave flaxen images of whatsoever passes by through her spindle and tapestry. However, one day, a graceful, charming young man passes by, and she feels very much attracted to his reflected image on her mirror. She quickly looks outside, and so the curse befalls her. She dies on her punt in the river, and only then does the young knight recognize her beauty. In AlMala’ika’s ‘The Moon Tree,’ a boy dreams of capturing the moon, and virtually does so! The villagers try to search for the moon, and eventually find it reasonable to ransack the boy’s cottage. However, they do not find it, and the entire story turns out to be some ‘summer’s dream.’ In fact, the poem was dedicated to Mayson, the poetess’s daughter, but it also functions at the real, poetic level as well. Tennyson opens his poem with: On either side of the river lie, Long fields of barley and of rye, That clothe the wold and meet the sky; And thro’ the field the road runs by To many-towe’d Camelot; And up and down the people go, Gazing where the lilies blow Bound an island there below, The island of Shalott.

It is a pictorial image, so to say: the fields of rye and barley encompass the land, and help create a peaceful settlement, full of hard-work and green. The island of Shalott, on the other hand, is a dreamy world, never occupied by workers or buildings. Only the lady of Shalott warbles by night: Only the reapers, reaping early In among the bearded barley, Hear a song that echoes cheerly From the river winding clearly, Down to tower’d Camelot.

And when the curse strikes, everything is thrown topsy-turvy, and the atmosphere of omen and fear pervades the whole scene: The stormy east-wind straining The pale yellow woods were waning,

Introducing the Stylistic Notions Overtones and Undertones 1

95

The broad stream in his banks complaining, Heavily the low sky raining Over tower’d Camelot; Down she came and found a boat Beneath a willow left afloat, And round about the prow she wrote The Lady of Shalott.

In a similar vein, Al-Mala’ika opens her poem with: On one top of the northern mountains, pine-covered, Clad in velvety scopes, and ambergris-smothered, There butterflies landed to spend the night, And by its well-springs, stars washed themselves clean.

When the boy succeeds in pouncing on the moon, Al-Mala’ika paints the following picture: And the boy returned him: with seas of brightness, a cup of softness, With those lips which preoccupied every old vision: He hid him in his hut, at it unboringly looking: Is that a dream? How? Has he the moon hunted?! He laid him in ambergris cradles And wreathed him with songs, his own eyes and daffodils!

It seems, therefore, that Al-Mala’ika is much influenced by the dreamy world of moons and stars insofar as Tennyson is fond of the imaginary tales of King Arthur and his knights. This inherently stresses the notion of the comparative undertone mentioned above.

OVERTONES The two poems also display almost clearly the idea of artistic ‘harmony’—or the overtone. By ‘artistic,’ I mean the evocative image each poem contains as well as the purpose behind such images. In Tennyson’s poem, pastoral imagery prevails and even extends till the end. The very first line reveals much about the rustic atmosphere of Camelot and the seclusion of

96

Amr M. El-Zawawy

the island. In line 19, ‘willow-veil’d’ is per se a metaphor in the sense that willows are compared to veils covering a lady’s face; and the mention of a ‘lady’ inherently brings to mind the lady of Shalott herself. In part iii, line 10, the ‘bridle’ of the charming knight is metaphorically likened to a lode-star, ‘glittering’ freely in the scope. Similarly, in the same part, line 98, the same image is sustained by stressing the fact that a comet is often seen at night over the island of Shalott. In ‘The Moon Tree,’ Al-Mala’ika succeeds in outwitting Tennyson, however: she dexterously employs certain images that sustain the dreamlike world of the poem. In part i, line 17, ‘the delicious light’ that passes upon the lad’s lips quenches his thirst: obviously enough, the light is metaphorically compared to a kind of wine or sweets, and a few lines later, ‘a cup of softness’ stresses the same notion. Also evocative is the phrase ‘cloudy cuffs,’ which is used to describe the moon. It is vivid and, amazingly, realistic, as the moon is at times clad in clouds, especially in winter. These are some of the tropes that attest to Al-Mala’ika’s vivid imagery as compared to Tennyson’s.

OVERTONES AND EPITHETS The idea of overtones still merits discussion: it is not adequate to treat it in that seemingly superficial way. I am here tempted to resort to Potebyna’s theory of ‘epitheton orans’ (cf. Bely, 1979). It states that ‘every adjective is an epithet in a certain sense; every epithet is essentially similar to one or another more complex form (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche).’ I shall explicate this theory in relation to the above-quoted figures of speech. In Tennyson’s poem, ‘willow-veil’d’ is said to be a metaphor. It can be analyzed in the following fashion: A- Willow- (a1) tall, (a 2) bending B- Veil- (b 1) long, (b 2) bending

willow-veil’d

In other words, we can say that ‘the veil is a willow.’ Conversely, though still on the verge of a metaphor, it can be said that ‘the willow is a veil.’ In ‘ a gemmy bridle glitter’d free,’ the same is detected: A- Gem- (a1) complex, (a 2) hard gemmy bridle B- Bridle- (b1) interconnected, (b2) controlling

Introducing the Stylistic Notions Overtones and Undertones 1

97

It is a metaphor, too, but it can be viewed in a different way: A- Bridle- (a1) concatenation, (a2) controlling B- Glitter- (b1) many rays, (b2) from similar sources

Bridle glittter’d

In Al-Mala’ika’s images, the same process seems to be at work, and ‘the doubt-knife’ can be analyzed as follows: A- Doubt- (a1) piercing, (a2) threat B- Knife- (b1) sharp, (b2) an object of threatening

Doubt Knife

This schema again produces a metaphor, as we can say ‘doubt is a knife.’ The two notions of overtone and undertone have to be combined in dealing with Al-Mala’ika’s other poems. The two notions are interrelated, and what the overtones may hypostatize what is actually the net result of what the undertones have once given extra emphasis to. This entanglement is clear when we tackle ‘An Elegy on a Valueless Woman.’ Al-Mala’ika stresses the valueless of the woman at issue by finding an ‘objective correlative.’ Consider the following line: Night surrendered nonchalantly to morning. The adverb ‘nonchalantly’ is the hub and heart of the line, having operational undertones within. It connotes that nothing is of value: there is nothing to care for, so everything is done carelessly or inadvertently. In this way, the ‘valuelessness’ of the woman finds a similar echo in the actions of the night and morning. The ‘battle of life,’ so to posit, is also shadowed or adumbrated in the ‘forays’ of stones launched by boys, along with the winds ‘fumbling with the roof-doors.’ More strikingly, the speaker of the poem spells it out: In a state of semi-deep forgetfulness. Moreover, the overtones of ‘forgetfulness’—being a word made up of four syllables—appear in the boredom invested by the ‘-ness’ suffix. Boredom is further mixed with the atrocious shock occasioned by the sudden stroke of death. The speaker of the poem seems baffled:

98

Amr M. El-Zawawy She passed away—no pale cheeks, no trembling lips; Nor did doors hear her death-story retold and retold. No blinds were drawn up, dropping sorrow and sadness, To follow the coffin staringly to its deadness Till it becomes the remains of a frame stirred by reminiscence.

CONCLUSION As such, it seems that the discussion of the duality of tone in this chapter has proved to be somewhat valid. What is suggested by the undertones, being the yardstick for adumbration and, at times, fantasization, is concurrently echoed in the overtones, which, if counted upon in the very beginning, may be misleading, though they, by way of circumlocution, might reveal a vestige of the strident undertones. It can be said that Nazik Al-Mala’ika’s poetry is too subtle to guess at or interpret at face value. It is a complex, interlayed structure of different levels of tonality.

Chapter 11

POETIC PERSONA AND OVERTONES IN ABUL-QASIM AL-SHABY’S POETRY INTRODUCTION Unlike Nazik Al-Mala’ika, Al-Shaby22 is a poet of ‘orotund undertones.’ This initial statement may sound paradoxical or ambivalent, but it is capable of being thoroughly explored. Not that Al-Shaby’s verse is imbued with a tincture of didacticism; rather it is ‘supra-didactic,’ so to speak, for what meets the eye is a path towards higher levels of connotations that cannot be explicated via educated guesses. For one logical thing, Al-Shaby is by no means a master of architectonics, yet his architectonics cannot be overlooked: there are moments in his poetry when the underlying meaning is by far more imposing than the structures that flow naturally and storm violently. In this study, the diverse undertones and strident tones in Al-Shaby’s poetry are examined, bearing in mind some of the political events that helped shape the unconventionality in his texts. This may necessitate finding the affinity between his verse and other poets,’ especially modernists. Moreover, the stylistic devices and rhetorical figures employed are examined in an attempt to arrive at a comprehensive appraisal of his poetry.

22Abul

Qasim Al-Shaby (1909 - 1934) was a Tunisian poet. He was born to a judge. He obtained his attatoui diploma (the equivalent of the baccalauréat) in 1928. In 1930, he obtained a law diploma from the University of Ez-Zitouna. He was interested in modern literature, and translated romantic literature, as well as old Arab literature. His poetic talent manifested itself at an early age and this poetry covered numerous topics, from the description of nature to patriotism. His poem To the tyrants of the world became a popular slogan.

100

Amr M. El-Zawawy

POETIC PERSONA AND OVERTONES Al-Shaby’s poems inherently assume that someone other than the author is addressing the reader. However, the ideas entertained by Al-Shaby cannot be dissociated from the ones expressed by the persona he introduces. In his ‘The Bard’s Heart,’ as a prominent example, Al-Shaby never uses the pronoun ‘I,’ though making shrewd use of ‘my.’ Consider the opening of the abovementioned poem: All that whiffs, treads, Sleeps, or hovers on Earth Of birds, roses, smells, Springs, branches heavy, Seas, caves, tops, Volcanoes, valleys and deserts All survives by my heart, free…

This elongated opening is overwhelming: Al-Shaby attacks the reader with a flood of successive images, ranging from whispered movements to the essence of human life. It is clear that he tries to impress us, and the deep queries of Al-Mala’ika’s verse are not echoed here. Al-Shaby attempts a deeper vision by examining the recesses of the poet’s heart unlike Al-Mala’ika who relates the existence of the poet to time and space. Consider the following extract from the same poem: Here, inside my heart deep and roomy, Death and spectra dance! Here, the horrors of nights blow fiercely; Here flutter dreams flowery. Here call the echoes of dying!

It is entirely made up of oppositions; and the result is that the poet’s heart is construed of as life itself, for it combines what is good and what is bad at the same time. The rhetorical device oxymoron in those lines focuses on creating an overtone of sadness and jubilation at once. Other poems also create a bizarre overtone. Consider the two following extracts: So I asked the Night, Which was gloomy, monstrous,

Poetic Persona and Overtones in Abul-Qasim Al-Shaby’s Poetry

101

Beauteous and strange, Gazing at it: ‘Are the Thunder’s song whining And Nostalgia crooning, Beside the sad Existence?’

Here, again, oppositions exist: nighttime is described as ‘gloomy’ and ‘beauteous.’ This can be taken as an echo of the poet’s heart, which is capable of giving rein to contradictory things. It is also noticeable that in the extract at issue, there is no reference to personal experience, and the pronoun ‘I’ is used only once. It is not a subjective poem, though the question of the poet or the speaker brings about the end of the poem: But the Night stood unmoving, Silent like Bleakness’s gurgling, With no echo!

The same idea of introducing a persona is found in other Arabic poems, namely Shoosha’s in ‘Time to Catch Time’ (1997): Night is bleak, Empty, Ever-gloomy And opaque-faced. Will its eyes allow one tears, And tears incur loss?23

In Shoosha’s ‘Shawqi,’ there is also the same veiled identity speaking: O Shawqi! Who else could kindle the fire of vengeance, Publicly vindicate the name of verse, Masterfully compose the tune of death And mourn the loss of our Andalusia? 24

At first sight, it appears that a poet is addressing another, but later the speaker concedes his inability to compose poetry like Shawqi, and all this 23 24

This extract was translated by M. M. Enani. This extract was translated by M. M. Enani.

102

Amr M. El-Zawawy

conducive towards considering the speaker like the readers: an average person admitting the poetic mastery of Shawqi. Further, Al-Shaby can be related to a more remote poet, namely Blake25. Both poets cloak their poems in nebulosity and try to delve into the recesses of the human mind. Blake tries to explore the religious aspect alongside the material aspect by being typically human, as his questions in ‘The Tyger,’ his famous song of experience, evince a very weary mind, much like that of teens: Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies. Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire?

The last two lines seem blasphemous as most critics have pointed out, but still there is something opaque: Blake, like Al-Shaby, attacks his readers in order to involve them in the thinking process. Also hard to conceive are AlShaby’s questions: ‘Are the Thunder’s song whining/And Nostalgia crooning, /Beside the sad Existence?’ How can a song express whining? What is meant by the singing of homesickness? Is it a kind of sadness or of being very close to one’s home? Why is existence sad, since nostalgia croons? Blake reaches the nadir of comprehensibility (and maybe blasphemy from a Christian point of view) when he writes: I saw a chapel all of gold That none did dare to enter in And many weeping stood without Weeping mourning worshipping I saw a serpent rise between The white pillars of the door And he forc’d & forc’d & forc’d Down the golden hinges tore 25

William Blake (1757 - 1827) was an English poet and painter. Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. He is also considered the forerunner of Romanticism.

Poetic Persona and Overtones in Abul-Qasim Al-Shaby’s Poetry

103

And along the pavement sweet Set with pearls and rubies bright All his slimy length he drew Till upon the altar white Vomiting his poison out On the bread & on the wine So I turn’d into a sty And laid me down among the swine.

The poem is quoted in full here to show that Blake follows the same line of thought adopted by Al-Shaby. Blake sets a general overtone through describing a particular scene, then calls the reader’s attention to some seminal fact or question, in which the hub and heart of the whole poem can be explored. As such, Blake involves the reader in the action just as he does in ‘The Tyger’ through a shocking exclamation of the tiger running in a tenebrous jungle. Al-Shaby does so, as he either involves the reader through an internal scene or through an external description. In ‘The New Morn,’ for instance, he opens the open with: ‘Clam down wounds/Shush sad pangs!’ It is an exclamation, and in ‘The Song of Thunder,’ there is: ‘In the still of Night, when/The Earth hugged Piety, /And hopes’ voices disappeared/Behind the scopes of slumber.’ Then, he poses his baffling questions, leaving everyone confused. The sudden jerks of emotions, as is expressed in the exclamation marks, resemble those exploited by Wordsworth, the proponent of Romanticism. Is this reminiscent of the query as to whether Al-Shaby’s poetry is Romantic or not? To do him justice, one can assume that it verges on the brink of Romanticism. For he usually channels his own feelings to a different destination: he is often preoccupied with the tribulation of his homeland under the brunt of colonialism. He may start by expressing his innermost feelings as in ‘The Bard’s Heart’: All that whiffs, treads, Sleeps, or hovers on Earth… All survives by my heart, free… Then, he ends his poem in an oblique intimation: Here, a thousand adversaries belligerent, Immortally revolving, unknown to boundaries.

104

Amr M. El-Zawawy

However, it may be counter-argued that this is not a valid generalization. In ‘Paradise Lost,’ Al-Shaby breaks free from political disputes, and ruminates on childhood days. He composes a whole poem on his own lost childhood, or perhaps his country’s? He opens his poem with: How many eras are there, pellucid and on the valley’s bank flourishing, Silver-dawned and golden in afternoons and mornings, And more tender than flowers and birds’ twitterings…

Those lines appear, at first sight, Romantic, but the reverse is true. The whole setting, accompanied by the dominant sensation of nostalgia, attests to the opposite: Al-Shaby tries to comingle homesickness with the need to see the self-same valley again. He longs for the day when he can see the same place verdant and shimmering with silver and golden beams. At a more complex level, the same scene may be related to liberating his country from French occupation. Thus, it seems that it is difficult to cast Al-Shaby’s poetry in a fixed mould. Still, Al-Shaby can be considered both a pessimist and an optimist. In ‘The Song of Thunder,’ he proposes to relate his own emotions to those of the ambient objects—night, earth, thunder, etc. He, as usual, sets the locale, then keeps on posing abstruse questions: is the lilt of thunder a whining song? Alternatively, does nostalgia warble in that sad universe? Before even leaving the reader to ponder, he comes up with a new, befuddling question: is it some force moving in a serpentine manner, full of injustice and rigmarole sounds, denoting torment? Al-Shaby may be preoccupied with something supernatural that can shake away colonialism. Although Al-Shaby offers a crass way of dealing with the matter, the whole process turns out to be another jerk of an unachieved ambition: But Night stood unmoving, Silent like Bleakness’s gurgling, With no echo!

At a symbolist level, night may refer to injustice and colonialism—a wellknown metaphor in Arabic--- and the simile of likening it to bleakness stresses the same idea. Yet the word ‘gurgling’ provides an oxymoron: how can bleakness include water? The final three-word line is also baffling: it underlines the oxymoron above, but the oxymoron is related to bleakness, not

Poetic Persona and Overtones in Abul-Qasim Al-Shaby’s Poetry

105

night, which is motionless and is not described as having any sound. It can be assumed that Al-Shaby attempts aporia and poetic wonders. He is thus a pessimist. On the other hand, he is an optimist. This is clear in his ‘New Morn,’ a lengthy, yet ambitious, poem. In this poem, the grief and injustices of the present find an outlet in his ‘hell’s inferno.’ Escaping the dreary present is a strong possibility, for the poem terminates in: Farewell! Farewell! Mounts of misery! You, grief fogs! You, hell’s inferno! I’ve slipped my canoe Through the vast sea, And I’ve unfurled the sails… Farewell! Farewell!

The repetition of the vocative ‘farewell’ stresses the notion that the speaker is an escapist; however, it remains arguable to where he will escape. Again, the poem poses a question, and then deviates from it almost bluntly. The speaker opens his lines with an invocation to ‘wounds’ to grow less sour and to pains to stop arising. Then, he explains how he has interred pains and dispersed tears; how he has used life as a ‘musical instrument’ to sing out his tunes; how he has heated ‘grief’ up into a liquid amongst the beauties of ‘existence’; and how he has goaded his heart into an oasis. Moreover, he uses the same opening line as a refrain for an unknown chorus. Does he refer to himself as the speaker and the chorus at the same time? Such a strange poem can be thought of as a vision, an optimistic one; and its dreamy appeal lies in the contrasting feelings of pain and hope. In combining such levels of analysis, Al-Shaby succeeds in coping with the moderns, where the psyche is the main theme. He defamiliarizes the idea of the dream by bringing together the desire to end colonialism and the weird dream buried in the psyche of a poet. Thus, the reader is asked to refer to reality in order to comprehend the connotations of escapism.

106

Amr M. El-Zawawy

Al-Shaby also adopts contrasting formal patterns26. While attempting to stir free from the formal shackles of traditional Arabic poetry, he remains faithful to the regular Arabic rhyme scheme, and further makes best use of the pithiness of rhyming couplets. For example, in ‘To the World Tyrants,’ the fluid, uncontrolled emotions of rage are conducive towards a mixture of couplets and tristichs. The Arabic original can be read as two couplets and a third rhyming line, or three successive rhyming lines. Consider, for instance, the following translation: O, you the oppressor, the unjust, The darkness lover, the life-foe! You’ve ridiculed the pains of a weak people, And your palm’s suffused with its gory hue. You’ve trampled on the existence charm, And on its top sown thorns of sorrow.

In another poem, Al-Shaby sticks to a certain pattern throughout the versified lines with an effect where the reader is lured into believing that it is traditional Arabic verse. In ‘Beauteous Tunisia,’ the rhyme scheme harps on ‫هـ‬ and the effect is the achieved through underlining the vastness of the poet’s love for it.

CONCLUSION It is difficult to venture on with a comprehensive reassessment of AlShaby’s poetry, not because it is modernist, but the fact is that his lines are passion-loaded and highly poetical. In his verse, what appears first as a tone of desperation turns out to be a vociferous call for optimism. More baffling still, the titles of his poems are reminiscent of certain emotions, much of which are 26Rhetorical

or stylistic devices are adeptly employed by Al-Shaby. I have tried to preserve this in my translation. In ‘The Bard’s Heart,’ the anaphora of lines 19-23 shows that the sense proceeds smoothly. In ‘The Song of Thunder,’ isocolon is employed. Consider the following: Recited a song Thunder Repeated by all beings The same number of words in the two successive lines is preserved. This underlines the power of thunder as set against the acquiescence of ‘all beings.’ Similarly, in ‘Paradise Lost,’ there are several lines which exhibit the same stylistic device: When Life floored our paths with flowers’ foliage, And days elapsed, carrying us, like birds’ flocks.

Poetic Persona and Overtones in Abul-Qasim Al-Shaby’s Poetry

107

pertinent to special undertones. The sanctity suggested by the diction vies with the drunkenness of phrases such as ‘sukr al-sho’our’ (i.e., ‘soberly drunken’), to give just one example. These contrasts leave his verse as rich and kaleidoscopic as modern poetry purports to be.

Chapter 12

THE STYLISTICS OF W.B. YEATS’S POETRY INTRODUCTION Most of the critical accounts written about Yeats27 focus on certain poems, and drift into hard-to-prove issues such as necrophilia and polyvalency. It will be tantalizing as well as confusing to start this essay with a list of the critical works on Yeats’s poetry: my beginning shall be the possible impressions, which inherently entail sensible effusions, so to speak, and the imaginative potential of Yeats as manifested in his stylistic capabilities. The fact is always that Yeats encompasses his poems with a shamanistic aura, and the reader is left to confront the obscure manifestations of the text at issue. But, is it possible to transcend that obfuscating aura, and venture on a reasonable exegesis of the poems chosen herein? A bold claim. The present study will make use of Yeats’s own introduction to his poetry, with all its oppositions and complexity. The various connotative overtones and undertones, as viable stylistic devices, will be investigated in his poems as compared to some Arabic and English poems as an exercise in comparative stylistics.

Butler Yeats (1865 –1939) was an Irish poet. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize. William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount, Ireland and educated there and in London; he spent his childhood holidays in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth and from an early age. His first volume of verse was published in 1889. He remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.

27William

110

Amr M. El-Zawawy

WISDOM, POETIC PERSONAE AND SYMBOLISM Thwaite (1957) once observed that: “…we must not assume that it is the calm wisdom of a contented old man. Rather, Yeats implicitly understood Blake’s maxim that ‘The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” (31)

With this pithy remark, Thwaite boils down a whole amalgam of critical works, and the central word here is ‘wisdom.’ To attempt a deconstructionist interpretation, this can be best based on The Concise Oxford Dictionary (2011) adapted definition: “Being wise, (possession of) experience & knowledge together with the power of applying them critically or practically, sagacity, prudence, common sense; wise sayings, etc.”

The entry is truncated. If the deconstructionist effort is even doubled, the most crucial word, viz. ‘practically,’ can be picked up as the central one in the definition. This word fits in with the context of Yeats’s understanding of Blake’s adage. What Yeats (in West, 1980) proves in poem after poem is that the notion of wisdom is a practical realm. He boldly wrote: “I wanted to write in whatever language comes most naturally when we soliloquize, as I do all day long, upon the events of our own lives or of my life where we can see ourselves for the moment.” (33-34)

Here, the idea of wisdom clearly recurs, especially in the last couple of lines. A wise man usually ruminates over the doings of others, and comes up with new insights. The same is true of Yeats: he is a sagacious man, yet bold and impulsive. In a sense, his wisdom is a mixture of youth and infirmity, the fusion of seemingly two opposites. And the problem arises forthwith: how can he bring the two together in his poems? The versification strategy, another viable stylistic device chosen by Yeats, is the core issue. But, like many modernists, he skates around that device by resorting to a persona. Selden (1990) discusses three types of persona: a propria persona, a dramatis persona, and a midway type. Propria personae are used in direct and indirect expressions (i.e., composions), whereas dramatis personae adopt a different voice, often detached from the

The Stylistics of W.B. Yeats’s Poetry

111

poet, and are of two subtypes: one is organized from a point of view; the other relatively autonomous. The third type of persona is, however, not consistent with all forms of poetry: it appears in Browning’s poetry, where the poet’s voice is disguised in a veneer of a speaking agent. With all this in mind, Yeats carefully constructs a persona having the qualities of the three types at once. In ‘A Dream of Death,’ the pronoun ‘I’ is not a referent of the poet, of course, and the whole scene is tinged with the tincture of wishy-washy tendencies: And left her to the indifferent stars above Until I carved these words: She was more beautiful than thy first love, But now lies under boards.

Why does he leave her? To write the above lines? The more the reader delves into the poem, the more confused s/he grows. The very first words set the scene of a dream, so were those lines composed in a dreamy trance? There is the possibility of having two opposites: being dreamy and being wideawake, and the two vie for supremacy in the reader’s mind. Better still, it might be a reverie. Yet all these interpretations are mere suggestions based on groundless assumptions. Other interpretations persist. The problematic choice of the word ‘carved’ is highly significant. Does the speaker of the poem, i.e., the persona, ‘carve’ the words on the beloved’s tomb or on his paper? If it was a night dream, how would he ‘carve’ the words on an imaginary grave? The answer can be the recourse to symbolism, not because it the only legitimate outlet, but because it is one of Yeats’s (qtd in West, 1980) preeminent poetic features: “…metaphors are not profound enough to be moving, when they are not symbols, and when they are symbols they are the most perfect of all, because the most subtle, outside of pure sound, and through them one can best find out what symbols are” (16).

It is clear now that the death of the girl is a symbol of something else. It is possibly a metaphor for the death of beauty or innocence without even being discovered or blurted out. Sufficient evidence proves the appetency for that notion in the poem, since the girl dies near ‘no accustomed hand.’ ‘The peasants’ are the masses rather than the multitude: they do not comprehend the incident, and assign her a run-of-the-mill pile of sand. This last point may bring to mind Nashe’s poem about the death of the beautiful, yet Yeats’s is

112

Amr M. El-Zawawy

more subtle. It describes the stars, the girl’s counters, as ‘indifferent’: they do not take heed of the deceased girl because she has been all her life an object of oblivion. The wisdom detected in the poem is thus excessive, for the idea of having a grave of innocence and charming beauty is an indictment of the death of unblemished objects or even purposeless intentions. It connotes romanticism, but is a self-pitying one. It is also reminiscent of the Arab poet Shawqi’s ‘They Deceived Her’28, where a lover woos his beloved. It also points to another poem by Yeats, namely ‘Wandering Aengus’: Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands. I will find out where she has gone, And kiss her lips and take her hands; And walk among long dappled grass…

Nevertheless, symbolism persists even further. Yeats distinguishes between two types of symbols: emotional and intellectual. The first type evokes certain emotions, while the second stirs related ideas. Although Yeats restricts the first to sound-symbols (e.g., patterns of rhythm and meter), it can be assumed that that they can be found in other manifestations, especially words. In ‘A Dream of Death,’ ‘strange,’ ‘no accustomed,’ ‘above her face,’ ‘solitude,’ ‘mound,’ ‘indifferent,’ among other phrases, all evoke distinct levels of emotiveness (cf. Galperin 1975). ‘Strange’ and ‘not accustomed’ substantially color the attitude of the reader from the outset: there is a sense of alienation and severance. ‘Above her face’ and ‘solitude,’ to select a seemingly unrelated couple, stir an emotion of concealment and confinement; for a girl’s innocence remains unknown all through her short life. Finally, ‘indifferent’ and ‘mound’ project a detestable image of the surrounding objects: the stars are insensitive just as the masses make a shapeless heap of sand covering the corpse. Intellectual symbols, in contrast, are detected through the persona. The cypress-tree stands for timelessness and ever-beautiful transformations. 28Ahmed

Shawqi (1868–1932) (The Prince of Poets ), was one of the greatest Arabic poets laureate. He was born to a family that was prominent and well connected with the court of the Khedive of Egypt. He obtained a degree in translation, and was then offered a job in the court of the Khedive Abbas II. After a year working in the court of the Khedive, Shawqi was sent to continue his studies in Law at the Universities of Montpellier and Paris for three years. In 1927, he was elected by his peers as Amir al-Sho’araa’ (literally, "The Prince of Poets") in recognition of his unsurpassed contributions to the literary field.

The Stylistics of W.B. Yeats’s Poetry

113

Cypress-trees are strong, ever-green and coniferous. By placing one beside the girl’s tomb, the persona succeeds in evoking the above-mentioned ideas, which are simultaneously mixed with the other associations of innocence and beauty--- sc. love, happiness, admiration.29 Such subtlety echoes Al-Shaby’s ‘New Morn,’ where the notions of escape are reshuffled. Both Yeats and Al-Shaby share the backdrop of multivalent symbolism: they present the readers with clear-cut lines, yet the denotation is far from being clear. Al-Shaby’s propria persona escapes something intolerable with an unknown destination. Similarly, the description of the deceased girl as ‘more beautiful than thy first love’ may be taken to purport a wish to escape death, just as Al-Shaby’s persona’s destination is imminent death.

EMOTIVE WORDS AND WAVERING RHYTHMICAL PATTERNS Yeats’s imaginative potential thus does merit some exploration. He uses words such as ‘wavering, meditative, organic rhythms, which are the embodiment of the imagination.’ This cumbersome phrase has, first of all, to be analyzed word for word. ‘Wavering’ connotes an indeterminate linchpin, i.e., the absence of a recurrent pattern. In ‘The Four Ages of Man,’ for instance, the following rhythmic pattern can be discovered: He with body waged a fight, x | x /| x / | x/ But body won; it walks upright. x / |x / | x / | /| x Then he struggled with the heart; x | x / | x x | x/ Innocence and peace depart. |/x x | x / | x/

The rhythmic pattern is inconsistent, since it is interspersed with spondee. Because it is ‘wavering,’ it brings about meditation; and because it is ‘meditative,’ it evokes a ‘wavering’ reaction. Thus, Yeats clothes meditation 29

Note how the opposite just happens in Yeats’s ‘The Mask,’ a poem about outward deception and the inability to dispense with it.

114

Amr M. El-Zawawy

in doubt, and this draws him nearer to the modernists with all their stresstimed poems. Yet his verse is ‘organic.’ In its simplest sense, organicity is integral recurrent patterns that associate the part with the whole in order to form a meaningful set. Yeats’s, however, relies on traditional themes that may be opposed to his call for meditation. The division of man’s life into discrete parts is not new. It is more akin to Shakespeare’s ‘The Seven Ages of Man’ (a speech from As You Like It), not because of the title but because of the fact that Shakespeare, like Yeats, is much interested in emotional symbols of sympathy. Consider the following excerpt from Shakespeare’s: And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms. Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school

‘Mewling’ and ‘whining’ depict the querulous infant and further integrate with ‘puking’ and ‘shining’ in order to add other connotations. Moreover, the reader senses that there is a fatherly aura in the lines, unlike the detached, callous depiction of Yeats. The lines are also slightly more humorous in contradistinction to Yeats’s ‘impulsive’ wisdom. There are similarities, though. The altercation between the body and the soul of man, as reported in Yeats’s poem, is the same as the infant in Shakespeare’s. The infant tries to express himself through crying and wriggling--- a possible fight with his slim body in order to assert his own existence, to usher his extant soul. ‘But body won!’ This is the same as the ‘creeping’ pupil of Shakespeare: the boy relies on his body as a means of sailing through the storms of life, of achieving his target, but for a while the influence of the soul falters. Then the most crucial stage commences: man begins to ‘struggle’ with the heart. He tries to use it as a subterfuge to attract a beloved or a ‘mistress’; and this forms the first step of losing ‘innocence’ and ‘peace’ of mind, since the professed lover will attempt a romantic relationship full of insincere emotions. Afterwards comes the ramification--- the desire to ‘trail’ an imposed feeling.

The Stylistics of W.B. Yeats’s Poetry

115

‘PASSIONATE’ SYNTAX Yeats further tackles the idea of ‘passionate syntax.‘ He observes that (qtd in West, 1980): “Because I need a passionate syntax for passionate subject-matter I compel myself to accept those traditional meters that have developed with the language.” (34)

Yeats is, in fact, a poet of passionate syntax. One prominent feature of this type of syntax is the use of ‘immanent pronouns’: one pronoun may govern the interpretation of a line or two without recurring in any. A valid instance is the effect of the pronoun ‘they’ on the fourth, fifth and sixth lines of ‘A Dream of Death.’ Here are the lines annotated with my addendum in brackets: The peasants of that land, Wondering to lay her in that solitude, And [they] raised above her mound…

The same is detectable in the ninth and twelfth lines. Another feature of ‘passionate syntax‘ is the omission of the copula in order to preserve the flow of the lines: What hurts the soul [is] [What] My soul adores… Also deleted is the connector ‘so’ in: Then he struggled with the heart; [so]Innocence and peace depart.

As such, Yeats’s syntax is unusual: it is the reflection of the emotive structure of the poem.

116

Amr M. El-Zawawy

CONCLUSION It is useful to recapitulate what has been discussed thus far by quoting Thwaite’s (1957) comment: “Yeats’s philosophy…was a hotch-potch, in many ways, of stoicism, mysticism and nonsense, culled from omnivorous reading and his own frustrations and doubts…Yet out of all this rag-bag of halfdigested and spurious knowledge, of human mistakes and vanities, came the greatest, and some of the wisest, poetry of this century.” (46)

GLOSSARY OF RECURRENT TERMS Atmosphere: The mood created by the aura. Aura: The evocations of a poem or piece of literature that point to the predominant mood. Broken Plural: In Arabic, a type of pluralization that does not follow the standard rules of Arabic inflectional morphology. Coinage: Inventing new words to be introduced into a particular language and be used later. Connective; connector: Any part of speech that can be used to connect two words or sentences or more in a piece of discourse. Diction: The words used by a particular author in a poem or piece of literature. Discourse: Written or spoken output ready for stylistic analysis. Epithet: An adjective that is constantly related to a particular entity to designate it. Isocolon: In poetry, a stylistic device that stipulates the same number of words in two successive lines. Noema: From the Greek word νόημα meaning thought. Husserl used noema as a technical term in phenomenology to stand for the object or content of a thought, judgment, or perception, but its precise meaning in his work has remained a matter of controversy. Overtone: The poetic features that readily attract the reader’s attention, being akin to form. Pharyngealization: A phonetic feature for the articulation of consonants or vowels where the pharynx or epiglottis is constricted. Unbestimmtheitsstellen (Spots of indeterminacy): Places in a text left unclear for the reader in order to elicit different responses from him/her.

118

Amr M. El-Zawawy

Undertone: The subdued tones that unite a piece of literature providing a well-organized whole.

Transliteration Symbols Arabic Letter Code ‫ء‬ ’, ? ‫ا‬ a, ā ‫ب‬ b ‫ت‬ t ‫ث‬ th ‫ج‬ j, g ‫ح‬ ḥ ‫خ‬ ḳ,x, kh ‫د‬ d ‫ذ‬ ḏ ‫ر‬ r ‫ز‬ z ‫س‬ s ‫ش‬ š, sh ‫ص‬ s ‫ض‬ ḍ ‫ط‬ t ‫ظ‬ z ‫ع‬ ‘ ‫غ‬ ġ ‫ف‬ f ‫ق‬ q, ‘ ‫ك‬ k ‫ل‬ l ‫م‬ m ‫ن‬ n ‫ه‬ h ‫و‬ w u, ū, o, ‫ي‬ y, ī, i ‫ة‬ ah, at

BIBLIOGRAPHY A contrastive study of English and Arabic. US Department of Defense, 1974. Abbas, Ali K. “Contrastive analysis: Is it a living fossil?” IRAL-International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 33, no. 3 (1995): 195-216. Ahmed, J. M. “Present mood in literature,” Atlantic Monthly, 198 (October, 1956): 163-164. Al’aqād, ‘Abās . ‘Aštāt majatm’āt fī alluġa wa al’adab, Cairo: Dār Alma’ārf, n.d. Al’askrī, Abū Halāl. Alfourūq alluġūya, recension and annotation by Maḥmd Ibrāhīm Salīm. Cairo: Dār al’alm wa aṭṭaqāfa, 1997. Alatis, James E. Contrastive Linguistics and Its Pedagogical Implications:[report of the Nineteenth Annual Round Table Meeting on Linguistics and Language Studies. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1968. Al-Batal, Mahmoud Mohammad Adel. The cohesive role of connectives in a modern expository Arabic text. PhD diss., University of Michigan., 1985. Al-Batal, Mahmoud. “Connectives in a modern expository Arabic text.” In Perspectives on Arabic linguistics: Papers from the annual symposium on Arabic linguistics. Volume II: Salt Lake City, Utah 1988, vol. 72, p. 234. John Benjamins Publishing, 1990. Al-Batal, Mahmoud. “Connectives in Arabic diglossia: the case of Lebanese Arabic.” Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science series 4 (1994): 91-91. al-Fayrūzābādī. Al-Qāmūs al-Muḥīṭ, recension and annotation by Muhamed Al-’Irqsousi. Lebanon: Al-risalah Publishing House, 2005.

120

Amr M. El-Zawawy

al-Gurgānī, Abdil-Qāhir: Dalā’il al-’I’gāz, recension by Maḥmūd Muḥammad Šākir, Cairo: Maktabat al-ḥāni¢ī, 2000. Alḥamzāwī, ‘Alā’ “Almaṭal wa atta’bīr alişṭilāḥī fī atturāṭ al’arabī.” (n.d.). Available online: http://www.saaid.net/book/9/2008.doc. Ali, Yasser Mohammed Hassan . Text grammar in modern Arabic poetry: A textual and analytic study of ‘Amal Dunqul`s poetry. PhD diss., University of Berlin, 2013. Al-Jarf, Reima. A contrastive analysis of English and Arabic morphology for translation students. AL-Obeikkan Printing Press, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 2000. Almaḥsanī, Abdurraḥmn Bin Hasan. Qaḍya attarāduf: alnaḍarya wattaṭbīq. (n.d.). Available online: www.angelfire.com/tx4/lisan/khamash.html. Alomoush, Omar Ibrahim. “The adaptation of English loanwords into Jordanian arabic.” Journal of language & literature (20780303) 2 (2010). Altoma, Salih J. “Nazik Al-Mala’Ika’s poetry and its critical reception in the west.” Arab studies quarterly (1997): 7-20. Amer, Walid M. “An investigation into the differences between English and Arabic consonant and vowel sounds: a contrastive study with pedagogical implications.” Available online: httpFsite.iugaza.edu.ps%2FwamerFAninvestigation-into-the-Differences-between-English-and-ArabicConsonant-and-Vowel-Sounds-review.pdf. Arromānī, Abū Alḥasan ‘Alī. Al’alfāḍ almatrādfa almatqārba alma’nā, recession by Fatḥ Allah Almaşrī. Mansoura: Dār alwafā’ lalnšr wa aṭṭabā’a, 1987. Aššāy’, Maḥmoud. Alforūq alluġūya wa ‘aṭarihā fī tafsīr alqura’ān alkarīm. Riyadh: Aloabīkān,1993. Austin, Frances. “The language of the metaphysical poets.” (1992). pp.59-60. Awwad, Mohammad. “Equivalence and translatability of English and Arabic idioms.” Papers and Studies in Contrastive Linguistics 26, no. 57-67 (1990). az-Zannād, al-Azhar: nasīg an-naşş, Casablanca: Al-markaz aṭ-ṭaqāfī al’arabī, 1993. Baker, Mona. “Review of methods used for coining new terms in Arabic.” Meta: Journal des traducteursMeta:/Translators’ Journal 32, no. 2 (1987): 186-188. Bauer, Laurie. “Compounds and minor word-formation types.” Bas Aarts and April McMahon (Eds.) The handbook of English linguistics (2006): 483506.

Bibliography

121

Bely, Andrei. “The magic of words.” Symbolism: An anthology, translated by T.G. West (1980): 104. Ben-Anath, Dafna. “The role of connectives in text comprehension.” Working Papers in TESOL & Applied Linguistics 5, no. 2 (2006):1-15. Bīḥīrī, Saīd ḥasan: Dirāsāt luġawiyyah taṭbīqiyyah fi-l-’ilāqah bayna-l-binyah wa-ddilālah,Cairo: Maktabat al-ādāb, 2005. Blau, Joshua. “An adverbial construction in Hebrew and Arabic: Sentence adverbials in frontal position separated from the rest of the sentence.” Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1977. Blevins, James P. “English inflection and derivation.” Bas Aarts and April McMahon (Eds.) The handbook of English linguistics (2006): 507-536. Bolinger, Dwight Le Merton. Meaning and form. No. 11. Longman Publishing Group, 1977. Cantarino, Vicente. Syntax of Modern Arabic Prose: The Expanded Sentence. Vol. 2. Indiana University Press for the International Affairs Center, 1974. Chambers Biographical Dictionary, 1984. Chierchia, G. ‘Formal semantics’ in R. E. Asher and J. M. Y. Simpson (Eds) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (ELL1) (2006): 564-579. Chomsky, Noam. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Multilingual Matters: MIT Press (1965). Clarke, Elizabeth. Theory and theology in George Herbert’s poetry:’divinitie, and poesie. Oxford University Press, 1997. Corder, Stephen Pit. “The significance of learner’s errors.” IRAL-International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 5, no. 1-4 (1967): 161-170. Cruse, D. Alan. Lexical semantics. Cambridge University Press, 1986. Crystal, D. (1980) A first dictionary of linguistics and phonetics. London: Andre Deutsch. Daher, Jamil. “Lexical borrowing in Arabic and English.” The Vocabula Review 5, no. 5 (2003). Daneś, Frantişek. “Prague school functionalism as a precursor of text linguistics.” Cahiers de l’ILSL 5 (1994): 117-126. de Beaugrande, R. de. R., Dressler, W. Introduction to Text Linguistics. London and New York: Longman Paperback, 1981. Dudley, D.R. and Lang, D.M. (eds). Classical & Byzantine, & Oriental African Literature 4, The Penguin Companion to Literature. Penguin, 1969.

122

Amr M. El-Zawawy

Eliasson, Stig. “Grammatical and lexical switching in Maori-English grasshopper speech.” RUUL. Reports from Uppsala University, Department of Linguistics 28 (1995): 63-80. Eliasson, Stig. “Models and constraints in code-switching theory.” In Workshop on constraints, conditions and models, vol. 17, (1991): 17-55. Fayed, Wafā’ “ Ba’ḍ şowar atta’bīrāt alişṭilāḥya fī al’arbiya almo’āşra.” Majla majm’ allaġa al’arbya badmšq, vol. 78, part 4, (2003): 895-916. Fowler, Henry Watson, Francis George Fowler, and David Crystal. The Concise Oxford Dictionary: The Classic First Edition. Oxford University Press, 2011. Frank, Marcella. Modern English grammar... Prentice-hall, 1972. Gadamer, Hans Georg. “Philosophische Lehrjahre E. Rückschau.” (1977). Gajzlerová, Marie. “Lexical development and change: New words in English language.” (2009). Unpublished diploma thesis, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. Galperin, Valery. English stylistics. Стилистика английского языка. Litres, 2015. Grosz, Barbara J., and Candace L. Sidner. “Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse.” Computational linguistics 12, no. 3 (1986): 175204. Hafez, Ola. “Phonological and morphological integration of loanwords into Egyptian Arabic.” Égypte/Monde Arabe 27-28 (1996): 383-410. Hall, R. A. Introductory linguistics. Chilton Books: New York, 1964. Hall, Robert Anderson. Introductory linguistics. Chilton Books, 1964. Halliday, MAlK, and Hasan, R. Cohesion in English. London: Longman, 1976. Hamid, Abdel Halim M. “A descriptive analysis of Sudanese colloquial Arabic phonology.” PhD diss., 1984. University of Illinois at Urbana. Harris, Roy. Synonymy and linguistic analysis. Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1973. Hartmann, Reinhard Rudolf Karl, and Francis Colin Stork. Dictionary of language and linguistics. John Wiley and Sons, Inc, 1972. Hasan, W. ‘The concept and use of synonymy in English & Arabic’ (n.d.). Available online: faculty.ksu.edu.sa/wjoodhasan/Documents/Synonymy. doc. Hobbs, Jerry R. “World knowledge and word meaning.” In Proceedings of the 1987 workshop on Theoretical issues in natural language processing, pp. 20-27. Association for Computational Linguistics, 1987.

Bibliography

123

Hu, Jianhua, and Haihua, Pan. “Processing local coherence of discourse in centering theory.” In Proceedings of the 15 th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong. 2001. Hughes, Arthur. “Problems in contrastive Analysis and error Analysis.” (1980). Available online: http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED192573. Husserl, Edmund. “Noesis and noema.” In Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, pp. 211-235. Springer Netherlands, 1982. Ibn Manzūr, Muḥammad Ibn Makram: Lisān al-’arab, recension by Abdil-Lāh Alī al-Kabīr wa āḫarīn, Cairo: Dār al-maārif, 1981. Ibrahim, Abdul Mahmoud Idrees. “Noun Formation in Standard English and modern standard Arabic: A Contrastive Study.” Journal of Language Teaching and Research 1, no. 5 (2010): 614-623. Ifill, Tim. “Seeking the nature of idioms: A study in idiomatic structure.” (2003). Available online: www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/Linguistics/ Papers/2003/ifill_tim.pdf. Iser, Wolfgang. The act of reading: A theory of aesthetic response. JHU Press, 1980. James, Carl. “Deeper contrastive study.” IRAL-International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 7, no. 2 (1969): 83-96. Kearns, Kate. “Lexical semantics.” Bas Aarts and April McMahon (Eds.) The handbook of English linguistics (2006): 557-580. Khafaji, Rasoul. “Arabic translation alternatives for the passive in English.” Papers and studies in contrastive linguistics 31 (1996): 19-37. Khulusi, Safa. “Contemporary poetesses of Iraq.” The Islamic Review (June, 1950): 40-45. Klein, Wolfgang. Second language acquisition. Cambridge University Press, 1986. Knott, Alistair. “A data-driven methodology for motivating a set of coherence relations.” (1996). Unpublished PhD dissertation, Edinburgh University. Available online: http://hdl.handle.net/1842/583. Lyons, John. Introduction to theoretical linguistics. Cambridge university press, 1968. MacLean, Ian. “Reading and interpretation.” Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative Introduction (1986): 122-4. Mani, Inderjeet, Eric Bloedorn, and Barbara Gates. “Using cohesion and coherence models for text summarization.” In Intelligent Text Summarization Symposium, pp. 69-76. 1998.

124

Amr M. El-Zawawy

Miftāḥ, Muḥammad: Dīnāmiyyat an-naşs, Casablanca: Al-markaz aṭ-ṭaqāfī alarabī, (2006). Monteil, Vincent, ed. Anthologie bilingue de la littérature arabe contemporaine. Impr. catholique, 1961. Murfin, Ross C., and Supryia M. Ray. The Bedford glossary of critical and literary terms. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997. Mustafawi, Eiman. “Loan English-origin nouns in Arabic: Codeswitches or borrowings.” In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association, Montreal, Canada. 2002. Myers‐Scotton, Carol. “Comparing codeswitching and borrowing.” Journal of Multilingual & Multicultural Development 13, no. 1-2 (1992): 19-39. Nida, Eugene Albert. Language structure and translation: essays. Vol. 8. Stanford University Press, 1975. Palmer, F. Semantics. Cambridge: CUP, 1996. Paret, Rudi. “The Qur’an.” Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period (1983): 186-227. Poplack, Shana. “Variation theory and language contact.” American dialect research (1993): 251-286. Průšek, Jaroslav. Dictionary of Oriental Literatures. Allen & Unwin, 1974., edited by Jaroslav Prusek and Jiri Becka, Basic Books, Inc., 1974. Rahmadsyah Rangkuti ‘Passive Voice: English and Arabic.’ (n.d.). Available online: imlaindonesia.com/index.php?al3x_download=file&userid. Redeker, G., 2000. Coherence and structure in text and discourse. Abduction, Belief and Context in Dialogue, pp.233-263. Rifatterre, M. “Hermeneutic models.” Poetics today 4 (1983): 1. Roach, Peter. English phonetics and phonology fourth edition: a practical course. Cambridge: CUP, 1990. Ryding, Karin C. A reference grammar of modern standard Arabic. Cambridge University Press, 2005. Selden, Raman. “From persona to the split subject.” Comparative Criticism 12, no. 12 (1990): 57-70. Selinker, Larry. “A brief reappraisal of contrastive linguistics.” Theoretical Issues in Contrastive Linguistics 12 (1981): 119. Shakespeare, William. As you like it. Available online: shakespeare.mit.edu/ asyoulikeit/full.html . Shoosha, Farouk. Time to catch time. Translated from Arabic by M. Enani. Cairo: GEBO, 1997. Stewart, Desmond. “Contacts with Arab writers.” In Middle East Forum, vol. 37, (1961): 19-21.

Bibliography

125

Stockwell, Robert P., J. Donald Bowen, and John W. Martin. The grammatical structures of English and Spanish. University of Chicago Press, 1965. Taboada, Maite. “Deciding on units of analysis within centering theory.” Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 4, no. 1 (2008): 63-108. Thwaite, Anthony. Essays on contemporary English poetry: Hopkins to the present day. Kenkyusha, 1957. Trask, Robert Lawrence. Key concepts in language and linguistics. Psychology Press, 1999. Van Dijk, Teun Adrianus. Text and context explorations in the semantics and pragmatics of discourse. 2nd ed. Singapore: Longman, 1977. Wadia, Mickey. ‘Brief analysis of Herbert’s conceit of the Pulley. http://www.luminarium.org (2001). Wardhaugh, Ronald. “The contrastive analysis hypothesis.” TESOL quarterly (1970): 123-130. Watson, Janet CE. The phonology and morphology of Arabic. Oxford university press, 2002. West, T.G. (ed.). Symbolism: an anthology. London and New York: Methuen, 1980. Whitman, Randal L. “Contrastive analysis: Problems and procedures.” Language Learning 20, no. 2 (1970): 191-197. Wikipedia: ‘List of Arabic loanwords in English.’ Accessed on 3/4/2011. Yang, Byung-gon. “A review of contrastive analysis hypothesis.” The East University Journal 19 (1992): 133-149.

AUTHOR’S CONTACT INFORMATION Dr. Amr M. El-Zawawy Doctor of Linguistics and Translation Department of English Faculty of Education Alexandria University [email protected]

INDEX

A abstraction, 64 access, 59 accommodation, 91 Acronyms, 25 Adaptation, 22, 29, 120 Adaptations, 24, 25, 27 aesthetic, 123 age, 15, 76, 88, 90, 99, 109 Agent, 35, 37, 38, 61, 62, 111 Alatis, 3 Al-Batal, 69, 78, 119 alienation, 112 Al-Jarf, 18, 34, 120 Allophone, 13, 14 Al-Ma’arri, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88 Alomoush, 26, 27 Al-Shaby, 79, 93, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 113 Altoma, 89, 90 amalgam, 110 annotation, 119 Antepenultimate, 13 anxiety, 86 Arabic, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27,

28, 29, 31, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 51, 52, 53, 55, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 90, 92, 101, 104, 106, 109,112, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125 Articulation, 7, 8, 11, 27, 117 Asia, 123 assimilation, 26 atmosphere, 88, 94, 95 Austin, 85 authenticity, 47 authorities, 25 awareness, 69, 82, 83 Awwad, 50, 51, 53 awzan, 31

B Baker, 25 ban, 26 banks, 95 base, 25, 36, 60, 65 Bauer, 17, 18 beams, 104 behaviors, 16 Bely, 96 Ben-Anath, 57 bending, 96

130

Index

benefits, 44 Bilabial, 8, 9, 10, 26 Blevins, 16 Bolinger, 41, 121 Borrowing, 21, 22, 24, 25, 82, 121, 124 breakdown, 17 Brno, 122

C Cairo, 10, 25, 71, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124 caliber, 23 candidates, 43 Cantarino, 36 capsule, 28 categorization, 78 Centering, 64, 67 Centers, 4, 61, 65, 67, 86, 121 charm, 69, 106 Chicago, 125 Chierchia, 43 childhood, 16, 81, 104, 109 Chomsky, 32, 121 cities, 74 Clarke, 88 classes, 6, 16, 20, 42 classicism, 85 classification, 52, 56, 70 Code switching, 22 Cognition, 62 Cognitive, 42, 57, 58, 60, 64 Coherence, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 78, 123, 124 Cohesion, 55, 56, 57, 68, 69, 70, 78, 122, 123 Cohesive, 56, 57, 69, 78, 119 Coinage, 117 collaboration, 57 color, 51, 112 commander-in-chief, 17 common sense, 17, 43, 110 community, 22, 93

Comparative, 16, 79, 89, 90, 93, 95, 109, 123, 124 competition, 46 complexity, 31, 65, 109 complications, 34 composition, 47, 69, 93 Compounding, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, See compounds Compounds, 17, 18, 19, 20, 38, 76, 120 comprehension, 60, 86, 121 computer, 25, 29 Concise, 110, 122 configuration, 61, 63, 64 confinement, 112 conjunction, 70, 71, 76 connectives, 57, 68, 69, 70, 76 connectivity, 57 consciousness, 83 consensus, 25 Consonants, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 18, 19, 27, 36, 117, 120 constituents, 49 construction, 37, 69, 88, 121 contour, 62 Contrastive analysis, 3, 4, 5, 6, 31, 119, 120, 125 Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis, 3, 4, 5 Contrastive linguistics, 3, 123, 124 coordination, 16 corruption, 45, 69 covering, 96, 112 criticism, 4, 86 Cruse, 41, 49, 50, 52, 53, 121 Crystal, 49, 121, 122 culture, 75 current limit, 64 Czech Republic, 122

D Daher, 22 dance, 93, 100 deaths, 88

131

Index decay, 41, 46, 83 decentralization, 19 degradation, 46 Department of Defense, 119 depth, 87 Derivation, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 29, 121 derivatives, 18, 20 destiny, 83 detectable, 68, 115 Devoicing, 26 dichotomy, 80, 91 Diphthongs, 7, 10, 11, 12, 14 Discourse, 31, 33, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 64, 65, 67, 69, 70, 78, 88, 117, 122, 123, 124, 125 discourse comprehension, 57 Disjunctives, 76 disposition, 61 distribution, 22, 73 doctors, 28 dream, 94, 95, 105, 111 duality, 98 Dudley, 67, 68, 81

F factories, 60 families, 21 fear, 83, 94 feelings, 86, 103, 105 femininity, 28 films, 28 fish, 74 flame, 63 flowers, 84, 87, 104, 106 fluid, 106 force, 62, 79, 80, 91, 104 foreign language, 6, 51, 52 formation, 18, 29, 38, 60, 120 fragments, 63 Frank, 17 freedom, 15 friction, 7 friendship, 15, 16 functionalism, 121 fusion, 110

G

E Egypt, 36, 71, 112 Eliasson, 22, 122 emotion, 43, 62, 112 employment, 16 English, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38, 41, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49, 51, 52, 53, 55, 57, 65, 70, 71, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 91, 102, 109, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127 epiglottis, 117 equality, 63 evidence, 29, 46, 111 exercise, 70, 109 exercises, 86 extinction, 86 extracts, 100

Gadamer, 85 Gajzlerová, 23 Gender, 28 Genitive, 19 genre, 91 Grammar, 3, 22, 24, 44, 69, 90, 120, 122, 124 Grammarians, 44, 45, 47, 51, 53, 70 Great Britain, 90 Greek, 18, 24, 117 Greeks, 24 grouping, 87

H Hafez, 22, 26, 27 hair, 50

132

Index

Hall, 18 Hamid, 11 happiness, 113 harmony, 70, 80, 91, 95 Harris, 42, 47, 122 Hartmann, 31 Hasan, 44, 56, 57, 69, 89 healing, 24 Herbert, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 121, 125 Hermeneutic, 82, 124 Hermeneutical, 81, 82 high school, 17 history, 24, 55, 102, 119 Hobbs, 56 homophones, 42 Hong Kong, 123 host, 26 House, 119 hub, 97, 103 hue, 106 Hughes, 5 human, 35, 60, 63, 86, 93, 100, 102, 116 humanism, 15 hypocrisy, 81 hypothesis, 4, 5, 6, 60, 125

Inferencing, 56, 59, 63 Infixes, 16, 20 Inflectional, 18, 28, 70, 117 infrastructure, 52 initial state, 99 injury, 52 innocence, 111, 112, 113, 114 insertion, 16, 77 integration, 22, 122 integrity, 22 intentionality, 69, 82 interference, 4, 6 internalization, 5 intonation, 14 Intransitive, 29, 34 Iraq, 89, 123 Ireland, 90, 109 Israel, 121 issues, 3, 14, 69, 79, 81, 109, 122

J James, 3, 81 Jordan, 71

K I Ibrahim, 17, 19 identification, 8 identity, 4, 37, 43, 61, 92, 101 Idiomatic, 49, 50, 51, 52, 123 Idioms, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 120, 123 image, 80, 94, 95, 97, 100, 112 imagery, 80, 90, 95 imagination, 84, 113 imitation, 84, 85 immortality, 93 impulsive, 110, 114 India, 23 individuals, 57, 58, 59 Inference, 64

Kearns, 43, 123 Khafaji, 33 Klein, 4 Knott, 55, 56 Kuwait, 71, 89

L language acquisition, 43, 123 language processing, 122 languages, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 14, 18, 21, 22, 24, 31, 41, 42, 46, 47, 49, 53 Latin, 18, 24, 72, 73, 75 learners, 4, 5, 6, 14 learning, 4, 5

133

Index Lebanon, 71, 119 lexemic, 17, 50 light, 11, 12, 27, 32, 43, 51, 52, 53, 55, 61, 82, 96 linen, 50 linguistics, 3, 6, 16, 51, 57, 68, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125 Loanwords, 13, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 45, 120, 122, 125 love, 59, 106, 111, 113 Lyons, 32, 42

M machinery, 15 majority, 5 mass, 24 materials, 62, 71 matter, 33, 44, 69, 73, 104, 115, 117 measurements, 31, 62 media, 37 medical, 52 melt, 88 membership, 58 memory, 60 metaphor, 50, 96, 97, 104, 111 meter, 112 methodology, 123 Mexico, 63 microstructures, 57 Middle East, 124 military, 52 models, 55, 58, 65, 78, 122, 123, 124 modernism, 81 modifications, 80 Moon, 93, 94, 96 Morphemes, 12, 15 Morphology, 3, 15, 18, 19, 20, 22, 117, 120, 125 mother tongue, xi MSA, 19, 52 music, 25 Mustafawi, 22

mythology, 85

N native-language, 14 Nazik Al-Mala’ika, 80, 89, 90, 92, 98, 99 Netherlands, 123 Networks, 63, 64, 66, 67, 70 neutral, 62 Nida, 42 Nobel Prize, 109 nodes, 63 Nominal, 52, 53 nonconcatenative, 15 nostalgia, 102, 104 nucleus, 19 Number, 28 Numerals, 20

O objectivity, 86 obstruction, 7, 11 omission, 34, 115 opacity, 50 operations, 60, 62, 63, 78 optimism, 80, 106 organize, 60, 61 overlap, 42 Overtone, 80, 91, 95, 97, 100, 103, 117 oxygen, 63

P Pacific, 123 paints, 95 palate, 10 Palmer, 33, 49, 50, 53, 124 parallelism, 91 Paret, 84 participants, 64 Participle, 20, 34, 35

134

Index

Passive, 15, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 123, 124 Passivization, 31, 32, 33, 34, 38 patriotism, 99 peace, 113, 114, 115 Penultimate, 12, 13, 26 permit, 27 pessimism, 79, 81 petroleum, 25 Pharyngealized, 10 pharynx, 117 phenomenology, 117 phonemes, 11, 26 phonetic, 82, 117 Phonology, 3, 7, 14, 22, 25, 122, 124, 125 Phrasal, 52 physics, 17 poetry, 68, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 109, 111, 116, 117, 120, 121, 125 poison, 103 police, 8, 65, 76 Poplack, 22 predicate, 57, 59 Prefixes, 16, 20 preservation, 41 prior knowledge, 61 probability, 63 problem-solving, 63 Processing, 55, 60, 61, 64, 65, 122, 123 professionalism, 47 project, 80, 112 pronunciation, 14 proposition, 60 psycholinguistics, 18 psychology, 18 purity, 24

Q quantification, 65 query, 103

questioning, 92

R radar, 26, 63 radio, 26 reading, 16, 80, 90, 116, 123 reality, 42, 105 recalling, 61 reception, 61, 120 recession, 120 recognition, 62, 112 recommendations, iv recovery, 64 recurrence, 63, 86 relaxation, 12 religion, 83 researchers, 70 response, 123 restrictions, 35, 50 rhythm, 8, 14, 45, 81, 82, 112 romantic relationship, 114 Romanticism, 102, 103, 112 Root, 15, 18, 19, 20, 24, 28, 29, 34, 36, 37, 84, 85, 86 roses, 100 rules, 12, 14, 20, 24, 60, 64, 74, 76, 81, 117 Ryding, 19, 24, 35, 37, 69, 70, 75, 76, 78, 124

S sadness, 98, 100, 102 Saudi Arabia, 71, 120 scent, 87 schema, 97 school, 13, 114, 121 schwa, 11 science, 119 scope, 4, 34, 36, 96 scripts, 57 second language, 4, 6 seed, 24

135

Index self-expression, 17 Selinker, 3, 124 semantic information, 60 semantics, 3, 6, 49, 69, 121, 123, 125 sensation, 104 senses, 61, 114 shape, 62, 68, 99 shock, 97 silver, 104 Singapore, 125 skin, 83 social reality, 73 society, 90 solitude, 112, 115 solution, 47 speech, 7, 11, 38, 68, 96, 114, 117, 122 speech sounds, 7 spelling, 6, 11 spindle, 94 stars, 95, 111, 112 state, 35, 38, 50, 58, 61, 62, 64, 82, 97 states, 5, 42, 50, 58, 61, 65, 85, 96 stem, 15, 17, 24, 29, 31 Stockwell, 5 storms, 114 stress, 7, 11, 12, 13, 14, 26, 92, 114 Stress placement, 12 strictures, 6, 88 stroke, 97 structure, 3, 4, 6, 17, 21, 22, 31, 32, 33, 35, 38, 51, 56, 57, 64, 68, 83, 87, 88, 91, 98, 115, 122, 123, 124 student teacher, 17 style, 25, 43, 61, 70, 71, 74, 82 Stylistic, 79, 80, 89, 91, 99, 106, 109, 110, 117 subjectivity, 86 substitution, 22, 26 substitutions, 27 Suffixes, 12, 16, 18, 20, 27, 28, 70, 97 supernatural, 104 surface structure, 32 Syllabic, 8, 14, 26

symbolism, 111, 112, 113 symmetry, 102 sympathy, 114 Synonymy, 41, 44 Syntactic, 6, 31, 49, 50, 51, 52, 64 syntax, 3, 49, 70, 115

T Taboada, 67 talent, 99 target, 33, 114 teachers, 3 telephone, 25 territory, 81 textbook, 49 textuality, 69 tonality, 98 tones, 91, 92, 99, 118 traditions, 79 traits, 62 Transformations, 31, 32, 34, 38, 112 Transitive, 29, 31, 34, 35 Translation, 6, 19, 20, 52, 53, 80, 106, 112, 120, 123, 124, 127 Transmorphemization, 27, 28 Trask, 49 treatment, 32, 69, 80, 90

U unconventionality, 99 Undertones, 80, 81, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 97, 98, 99, 107, 109, 118 UNESCO, 25 uniform, 38 universality, 86 universe, 104

V valueless, 97

136

Index

van Dijk, 57, 58, 59, 60 variations, 15, 18, 31 vein, 85, 95 Verbal, 52, 53 vibration, 8 vision, 81, 95, 100, 105 Voice, 15, 31, 32, 34, 36, 38, 88, 110, 124 Voiceless, 8, 9, 10, 26 Voicing, 7, 8, 9, 26, 27 Vowels, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14, 15, 18, 26, 27, 36, 37, 117, 120

W Wadia, 85 war, 26 Wardhaugh, 5, 6

Washington, 56, 90, 119 water, 10, 23, 83, 104 Watson, 10, 11, 12 weakness, 4 wealth, 60, 78 weeping, 102 wholesale, 50 Wisconsin, 89 withdrawal, 76 workers, 94 working memory, 64

Y Yeats, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116 yield, 23, 42