Abstract:This study aims at exploring the reasons that drive many Facebookers to share negative posts on Facebook, with a special focus on their gender and age. It also aims at identifying the negative attitudes and feelings that negative Facebook posts might evoke in Facebookers. Thus, a mixed-methods approach was adopted employing both a five-point agreement Likert scale questionnaire and semi-structured interviews which were conducted with 40 participants. Based on the participants' responses, the results show that many Facebookers write posts to satisfy different needs including receiving compliments and attention, sharing daily updates, showing off, and deliberately teasing others, all of which have been found to trigger feelings of jealousy, hatred, annoyance, demotivation, inferiority, and sadness. The study concludes with recommendations for further research.
This study aims at identifying the loanwords commonly used in Emirati Arabic (EA), determining their origins and identifying the reasons behind using them. It also investigates the impact of gender, education, and age of speakers of EA on the use of loanwords. To meet these ends, a questionnaire was designed and distributed among 90 speakers of EA who were then classified into three groups: 1) gender; females and males, 2) education; educated and uneducated, and 3) age; young and old. The results show that female EA speakers, educated EA speakers, and young EA speakers use loanwords more than their counterparts in their specific groups. Moreover, the results show that EA speakers use loanwords of different origins like English, Persian, Hindi, and Turkish in addition to a few words of French, Italian, German, and Spanish. The study discusses the possible reasons for these results and concludes with some recommendations for further research.
This study measures the extent to which Arabic-speaking EFL learners are aware of polysemy in English. It also investigates whether the English proficiency level of Arabic-speaking EFL learners plays a role in their ability to distinguish between the various meanings of English polysemous words, and whether they face problems when they encounter these words in unusual contexts (i.e. the contexts that employ the extended meanings of the target polysemous words). To these ends, a translation test in which the participants were asked to give full Arabic translation for fifteen English sentences was designed. The words open, run, and make were the target polysemous words in this study. The Results show that Arabic-speaking EFL learners have little awareness of polysemy in English, and their English proficiency level does play a role in their ability to distinguish between the different meanings of English polysemous words. It was also found that Arabic-speaking EFL learners have no problems guessing the primary meaning of the English polysemous words. However, they face difficulty guessing the extended meanings of polysemous words in unusual contexts. Moreover, some Arabic-speaking EFL learners can guess the extended meanings of the polysemous words they encounter in familiar contexts, or when they understand some cues provided to disambiguate these words. This study concludes with some pedagogical implications and recommendations for further studies.
This study examines the production of geminates in Emirati Pidgin Arabic (EPA) spoken by blue-collar workers in the United Arab Emirates. A simple naming test was designed to test the production of geminates to determine whether the EPA speakers would produce a geminated or degeminated phoneme. Following that, a semi-structured interview was conducted with a subset of the study cohort to obtain the participants’ own explanation of where they degeminated the consonants. Our findings suggest that the exercising of this choice functions as a sociolinguistic strategy, akin to the one observed by Labov in his study of Martha’s Vineyard. In particular, our findings show that speakers of EPA are inclined to degeminate consonantal geminates to establish themselves as members of a particular social group. The reasons for wanting to achieve this aim were given as follows: to claim privileges only available to members of this group (such as employment); and to distinguish themselves from the dominant cultural group. The study concludes that degemination in EPA has developed into a sociolinguistic solidarity marker.
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