Grounding In English And Arabic News Discourse

Grounding in English and Arabic News Discourse explores the discourse notion of grounding (viz. the foreground-background structure), and examines it in the various structures that occur in short news texts. A text-level approach to grounding and the differentiation between several core concepts relating to the various textual and non-textual structures, distinguish the book from other approaches in the field. A corpus-based analysis focuses on sentence-initial expressions and examines the grounding-signalling function of several markers in both English and Arabic. The analysis captures constraints on the occurrence of particular markers, and the extensive illustrative examples explain the strategies that writers employ to cope with problems of recasting grounding-values in news texts. The author also shows how the failure to signal appropriate grounding-values is likewise associated with the failure to deliver the appropriate type of text. Grounding is a relatively unexplored area of investigation in Arabic (text)linguistics, and the study identifies a series of previously unrecognized language features, highlighting the discourse pragmatic function that syntax serves. The book will be invaluable to researchers and students of discourse, pragmatics, contrastive rhetoric, and communication. It will also be of interest to all those involved in translation and intercultural studies.

The aim of the European Cognitive Science Conference is the presentation of empirical, theoretical, and analytic work from all areas of interest in cognitive science, such as artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology. The focus is on interdisciplinary work that is either of interest for more than one of the research areas mentioned or integrates research methods from different fields. With contributions by cognitive scientists from 20 different countries, the papers in this volume reflect the origins of this conference, as well as its international scope.

Thematic Structure and Para-Syntax: Arabic as a Case Study presents a structural analysis of Arabic, providing an alternative to the traditional notions of theme and rheme. Taking Arabic as a case study, this book claims that approaches to thematic structure propounded in universalist linguistic theories, of which Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics is taken as an illustrative example, are profoundly wrong. It argues that in order to produce an analysis of thematic structure and similar phenomena which is not undermined by its own theoretical presuppositions, it is necessary to remove such notions from the domain of linguistic and semiotic theory. The book initially focuses on Sudanese Arabic, because this allows for a beautifully clear exposition of general principles, before applying these principles to Modern Standard Arabic, and some other Arabic varieties. This book will be of interest to scholars in Arabic linguistics, linguistic theory, and information structure.

The Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics is a major multi-volume reference work. It is a unique collaboration of hundreds of scholars from around the world and covers all relevant aspects of the study of Arabic, dealing with all levels of the language (pre-Classical Arabic, Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Arabic vernaculars, mixed varieties of Arabic).

Since September 11, Arab and American journalists have been trading barbs, accusing each other of bias and a lack of objectivity. But is news coverage in Arab countries all that different from American coverage? The Making of Arab News draws comparisons, including examples of Arabic news language and their English translations, to show how Arab news values have been Americanized and how these values are reflected in the language used in the Arab news. Noha Mellor further discusses claims that the current development in the Arab news media could be the first step toward democratization.