Ekhlas Ali Mohsin Al-Shammari

Blending in English is a widely recognized means for forming new lexemes by joining two or more existing words in a way where at least one of them is shortened (Algeo 1991: 10). Familiar examples are brunch from breakfast and lunch, slanguage from slang and language, and chortle from chuckle and snort (Algeo 1977: 49). Linguistic studies of English blends – which are numerous – have focused in particular on the three following features of blends: the cut-off point in the source words, the proportional contributions from the source words to the blend, and the stress pattern of the blend. The main aim of the present research is to examine Arabic blends in the light of the blend formation tendencies that have been identified with respect to these features in English. Blends in Classical Arabic are generally formed by joining the first two root consonants of each source word and imposing the prosodic pattern CaCCaC on them. Typical examples of Classical Arabic blends are /ʕabdar(ij)/ 'someone from the family of Abdul Dār' < /ʕabd/ 'slave' and /da:r/ 'house', /ʕabqas(ij)/ 'someone from the family of Abdul Qays' < /ʕabd/ 'slave' and /qajs/ 'a male name', and /ʕabʃam(ij)/ 'someone from the family of Abdi Shams' < /ʕabd/ 'slave' and /ʃams/ 'sun'– all names for Arab tribes in the 6th Century AD. However, such Classical blends are few in number. The more numerous blends that have been formed in Arabic in recent times do not appear to follow this root-and-pattern template. Examples are /fawsʕawt(ij)/ 'supersonic' < /fawq/ 'above' and /sʕawt(ij)/ 'sound', and /qabħarb/ 'pre-war' < /qabl/ 'before' and /ħarb/ 'war'. Since no linguistic study has investigated in depth the structure of modern Arabic blends, the main aim of this thesis is to uncover the regularities that are found in these modern formations and in that way contribute to understanding the structure of Arabic words in general and blends in particular. The main research question in this study is: To what extent do the blend formation tendencies identified in English apply to blend formation in Arabic? The data for Arabic come from published resources as well as a survey and an experiment, both designed to collect some novel blends by asking native speakers of Arabic to form blends from a list of word pairs. These data were examined in light of the main features and tendencies related to blend-formation in English. The overall result of the investigation is that there is a high degree of resemblance between modern Arabic blends and English blends. This is the case for both the established Modern Arabic blends and the novel invented blends. In this respect, they differ notably from the established blends of Classical Arabic. The main tendencies for forming Arabic blends that have been identified in this study are: (1) There is a general tendency for the cut-off points in source words to occur at syllabic joints with the greatest preference for them to occur between syllabic constituents. (2) There is a general tendency for the greater proportional contribution to come from the shorter source word, and for source words of equal phonemic lengths to contribute equal proportions to the blend. (3) There is a general tendency for the stress pattern of the blend to be identical to that of the source word that has identical syllabic size as that of the blend.

AbstractThe duality of ‘meaning’ and ‘saying’ in the question: “Do you mean what you say?” can be inferred according to the speaker/hearer duality. It may apparently reflect some views: a hearer who is not sure of what the speaker really means by what s/he says, a speaker who may not say what s/he means, or speaker who does not mean what s/he says. Hence, there is no concordance between what is said and what is meant. This consequently shows a distinction between an explicit and implicit meaning of the utterance. What is actually said and what is really implied is investigated by semantics and pragmatics respectively and even to use both disciplines to find out the distinguishing features. However, that question gives rise to still a number of problems in understanding and dealing with these two notions of such a conversational phenomenon.

Teachers might sometimes wonder whether they can achieve their objectives perfectly in the course of their teaching career. Every time they enter the class, they find out a better way for teaching their students and encounter new situations that push them forward towards modifying their previously scheduled plans. Besides the new teaching trends, the teachers' rebellious mental vision of getting at a perfect teaching-learning process may have a role in improving their total plans. This vision might be regarded as one of the main resources that other educators might consult while designing their teaching plans or even implement during their lessons. It might also be affected by their ambitious attempts to have an everlasting comprehensive model for teaching/learning perfectly. The present paper is a display of a teacher's vision of a perfect teaching-learning process through exposing some of the researcher's practical as well as hypothetical viewpoints of the steps of this process starting from writing a lesson plan until ending up with getting at the outcomes, i.e., the assessment results. The significance of this paper lies in the fact that the researcher might share some of her viewpoints with other teachers, sometimes by intuition others by experience, for the perpetual aim of all teachers is to get at a perfect teaching-learning process. The other significance is that some teachers might agree or disagree with what she implements and/or proposes. Moreover, these two opinions are the main source for creativity and innovation, the matter that may lead other teachers to write down their viewpoints, so that we can all get at a convenient way to maintain our perfect teaching-learning process. As a sample or a model of what the researcher wants to clarify, she might refer in the present paper to some of her classes that she taught to university students at the department of English in the College of Arts.

It has always been difficult for language learners to relate a particular item from a given language with its appropriate equivalent counterpart in another language. And, this difficulty appears more clearly and mainly when bilinguals try to translate an expression from one language to the other. The present paper is an attempt to relate the English socalled synthetic verb and its equivalent analytic construction with their equivalent counterparts in French and vice versa. The paper consists of two parts: the first is a set of preliminaries about these two expressions in English- their definitions, formation processes and patterns; the second is a paralleling analytical survey between these expressions in English and their equivalent counterparts in French and vice versa. Along the second part, two main Internet resources are used to support the researcher's work- the Google Translate website and a collection of poems by the French poet Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891). Choosing Rimbaud in particular is due to the fact that the researcher has previously achieved a study about him and his poetry; besides there is a website containing his poems in French and in English, the matter that shall facilitate the process of conducting this study. It is also worth mentioning that the preliminaries in this paper are basically based on a previously achieved study by the researcher, namely a Master's thesis entitled "TheProduction of English Synthetic and Analytic Constructions by Iraqi College Students". Finally, a set of conclusions arrived at by the researcher is to be stated at the end of the paper.