This doctoral dissertation improvement grant project investigates the occurrence of 'double negation' or, more technically, 'negative concord' in the Levantine dialects of spoken Arabic (including Palestinian, Jordanian, Lebanese, and Syrian), and compares it with similar phenomena in Egyptian and Moroccan dialects. Negative concord is common in colloquial English but is generally considered incorrect. However, the phenomenon is widespread in the world's languages, in many of which it is considered a correct form of expression, including Spanish, Italian, French, Russian, Polish, Japanese, and many others.
This project will be the first to specifically identify and study this grammatical phenomenon in spoken Arabic. This is of interest and relevance for everyone with an interest in Arabic, because it provides more detailed information on the grammatical structure of the Arabic dialects, as well as additional means for distinguishing speakers of different dialects from one another. As a result, this study may improve our ability to translate Arabic automatically, to obtain data from Arabic texts, and to improve the quality of teaching in spoken Arabic classes. For the field of linguistics, the project will extend the study of negative concord to a language in which it has not been studied before, and provide a rich new data set that will be made available to the public via professional publications, conference presentations, and the internet.
