LANG 3057 Languages and Grammatical Concepts 3A: Arabic
Credit Points 20
Legacy Code 101709
Coordinator Zouhir Gabsi Opens in new window
Description This is an advanced Level 3 language and linguistics subject for students of modern Arabic. Lectures for the grammatical concepts component are held in English for students of all languages while other activities are language-specific. The aim of the subject is twofold. On the one hand it aims, to develop a practical and theoretical understanding of the ways in which major concepts used in everyday speech and writing are mapped and organized in the lexicon and the grammar of human languages, and how these forms develop in learners and users. On the other hand, it aims to develop advanced comprehension and production skills in Arabic language, including higher stages optional structures, through critical examination of contemporary and historical text and discourse samples from a variety of registers. An understanding of contemporary Arab culture and society is also fostered through comparative research projects on specific cultural, social and/or linguistic, aspects that are of interest to students. A range of CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) activities are utilised for this subject.
School Humanities & Comm Arts
Discipline Southwest Asian and North African Languages
Student Contribution Band HECS Band 1 20cp
Check your fees via the Fees page.
Level Undergraduate Level 3 subject
Incompatible Subjects LANG 3010 - Arabic 301 LGYA 1259 - Languages 303 Grammatical Concepts Across Languages
Assumed Knowledge
Successful completion of 40 credit points of Arabic Language at Level 2.
Learning Outcomes
- gained an understanding of languages families, main linguistic typologies and the collocation of Arabic within the Semitic languages family;
- acquired an understanding of key concepts and terminology in the study of lexical categories and sentence structure in the world languages with a specific focus on Arabic;
- developed ways for identifying those lexico-grammatical concepts through corpus analysis in Arabic compared to English and other languages;
- identified and learned to describe key areas of interface between pragmatically motivated language use and language structure reflecting on texts from different historical periods and critically using their own bilingual and/or multilingual experience;
- gained an appreciation of cross linguistic development and particular difficulties in learning other languages with specific focus on learning Arabic; and
- attained an advanced level of lexico-grammatical ability in productive skills and in reading comprehension
Subject Content
- An introduction to Basic concepts in identifying language families and typologies
- identifying and discussing major grammatical concepts, Categories and terms across languages at lexical level including verb, noun, person, number, tense and modality
- identifying and discussing major grammatical concepts in reference to syntactic structure across languages with reference to canonical or default mappings
- pragmatic and Semantic contribution to syntactic choices. e.g. politeness and probability, Topic and focus and their contribution to special Mapping on linguistic structure, such as question formation, passives, emphatic constructions
- Developmental Issues and difficulties in The acquisition and/or translation of those Structures across languages
Grammatical structures and their functions in the following areas:
- Review of advanced aspects of Arabic grammar e.g. Nominal and Verbal Sentences; negating and expressing tense; reported speech; nominative, genitive and accusative cases and their applications
- Study and analysis of some exemplary texts: Classical, modern Standard Arabic and dialects
- Practice in applying grammatical aspects in writing to produce comprehensive and grammatically correct text across diverse genres;
- Searches of internet sites and other original sources for retrieval of relevant corpus data (diachronic and synchronic, written as well as, where Possible, spoken discourse) for processing, analysis and use. written and spoken materials may include short stories, Biographies, anthologies, children stories, articles from newspapers and magazines, plays or film excerpts, news and interviews
Prescribed Texts
- A collection of language and culture-specific reading materials, notes and exercises will be developed and made available including online material.