Program

"Arabic Linguistics Across Traditions"
April 9–11, 2010
AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center
The University of Texas at Austin

Preliminary Program

Friday April 9  

9:00-10:30            Negation    

Chatar-Moumni Nizha, Université Paris Descartes
Negative association in Moroccan Arabic

Frederick Hoyt, University of Texas at Austin
Negative Concord and SV in Two Dialects of Arabic

Abbas Benmamoun, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
A Corpus Study of Negative Particles in Arabic Varieties

10:30-11:00            Break

11:00-12:00            Keynote Address:  "Arabic as a Semitic Language"
John Huehnergard, UT Austin

12:00-1:30          Lunch Break

1:30-3:00            Discourse analysis and Semantics

Keri Miller, University of Arizona
The Paradox of the Term 'Democracy' in Arabic Discourse on Islamic Movements

Dana Abdulrahim & John Newman, University of Alberta
How many ways to GO in Arabic? A corpus-based approach to determining polysemy and synonymy of the verbs ḏahaba, maḍā, rāḥa,and inṭalaqa

3:00-3:15            Break

3:15-4:15           Computational Linguistics 

Rania Alsabbagh, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
An Unsupervised Approach for the Automatic Detection and Resolution of Ambiguous Arabic PP Attachments

David Schulz, Wisconsin Lutheran College
Automatic Generation and Evaluation of Foreign Names in Arabic Script

4:15 - 4:30          Break

4:30 - 5:30         Syntax II   

Wassim Bekai, University of Nizwa, Oman
Are Subject and Object Markers clitics or non-clitics in South Lebanese Arabic?

Alexander Magidow, University of Texas - Austin
Explaining Case-Marking in Spoken Formal Arabic

6:00            Dinner

Saturday April 10

9:00-10:30            Sociolinguistics     

Uri Horesh, Franklin & Marshall College
Generational variation among Palestinian women: An age grading hypothesis

Atiqa Hachimi, University of Toronto
Dialect change and the family in Morocco: The case of gender concord among three ethnolinguistic families in Casablanca

Abdulkafi Albirini, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Bi-dialectal Code-switching and the Origin of Arabic Varieties

10:30-11:00            Break

11:00-12:00           Keynote Address:  "Analyzing Variation in Arabic"
Enam Al-Wer, University of Essex

12:00-1:30            Lunch Served Courtesy UT Graduate School

1:30-2:30            Phonology    

Mahasen Abu-Mansour, Umm Al-Qura University
An optimality theoretic account of hypocoristic formation in Makkan Arabic

Rawiah Kabrah, Umm Al-Qura University
Opaque and transparent stress in Makkan Arabic

2:30-2:45            Break

2:45-4:45            Psycholinguistics and Language Acquisition 

Reem Khamis, Adelphi University & Karen Froud, Columbia University
Neurocognitive investigations of codeswitching in Arabic Diglossia: breaking with tradition

Khawla Aljenaie, Kuwait University & Abbas Benmamoun, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The acquisition of Kuwaiti Arabic Questions: The Movement and In-Situ Strategies

Rajaa Aquil, Georgia Institute of Technology & Scott Jackson, University of Maryland
Internalizing Arabic phonotactic rules: Is it proficiency based?

Marwa Ragheb & Davis Stuart, Indiana University
The acquisition of word-final consonant clusters in Cairene Arabic: An OT analysis

Sunday April 11

9:00 - 11:00          Special Session: Syntactic Approaches to VSO and SVO Word Order 

Hamid Ouali, Chair
Mohammad Mohammad, UT Austin

Martin Walkow, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Subject Verb Agreement Asymmetries and the Distribution of Labor between Syntax and Morphology

Peter Glanville, University of Texas - Austin
A Lexical Functional Grammar analysis of Arabic pronoun placement