The purpose of this study is to see whether gender plays a role in the apology strategies employed by native speakers of Arabic, i.e., how Arab males and females express apologies in different situations. Data necessary for this study were collected via a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) questionnaire, incorporating 10 real-life scenarios in the form of short descriptive statements. In accordance with the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realisation Patterns, participants’ responses(n = 20) were analysed and further classified into five distinct apology strategies: (Illocutionary Force Indicating Device (IFID), Responsibility (RESP), Explanation (EXPL), Repair (REPR), and Forbearance (FORB)). The researcher initially hypothesised that apology strategies employed by participants would exhibit more differences than similarities among native speakers of Arabic. Contrary to previously conducted research on this subject (i.e., attesting more differences), the data analysed (n = 350 apology exchanges) revealed more similarities than differences regardless of gender. In fact, no statistically significant differences were found. In addition to contributing to the current theoretical debate on gender and gender-related topics, the results of this study may entail pedagogical implications for those in direct contact with Arab learners of English as a Second Language or with speakers of Arabic in general terms.
This paper aims to provide a short overview of the English article system along with a detailed account of the sources of difficulty that makes such a complicated system uneasily attainable for ESL learners. According to Hewson (1972), "the definite and the indefinite articles are among the ten most frequent words of English discourse" (p.131). As such, learners of English are likely to be heavily exposed to hundreds of instances that contain a wide range of uses of English articles, which will, presumably, provide non-native speakers with a perceptibly increased level of accuracy. However, the English article system has been reported to be one of the most difficult features of the English language, causing some students enormous difficulties; particularly, of course, those whose native languages do not use articles (Master, 1990; Mizuno, 1999; Park, 2006; inter alia). In this paper, I will discuss the factors that make the English article system difficult for speakers of other languages to use appropriately. The paper will be divided into three sections: (1) a short overview of the article system, (2) internal factors: those that pertain to the internal structure of English such as lexico-syntactic and discoursal factors, and (3) external factors: those that pertain to other languages such as presence or absence of the article system. Possibly unlike previously published research, this paper combines both factors and further works to the advantage of new instructors as it provides them with the rationale behind ESL learners' inappropriate usage of the article system.
The purpose of this paper is to provide an Optimality-Theoretic (henceforth OT) account of the linguistic phenomenon of borrowing. In particular, it examines English loanwords in Hawaiian from a constraint-based analysis as opposed to a rule-based analysis. Data necessary for this study consisted of some randomly selected Hawaiian words. These loanwords were carefully examined as to realize their phonological changes and how they can be accounted for from an OT standpoint. Several phonological changes, mainly those of the syllable structure of Hawaiian, were examined along with accompanying phonological processes (e.g., epenthesis, degemination, etc.) where applicable. The proposed ranking hierarchy that, the argument goes, could account for all English loanwords in Hawaiian is like this: Σ{NO CODA >> MAX-IO >> *CC >> DEP-IO}, a state of affairs which confirmed our intuition that the syllable structure of the borrowing language (Hawaiian) prevails over the syllable structure of the donor language (English). In order to establish the ranking argument, comparative tableaux are used. Violations tableaux are also used to demonstrate how the winning configuration beats competitive candidate forms.
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