The distribution of Arabic action nouns in text production

Abstract The study examines grammatical differences between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Palestinian Arabic (PA) in narrative and expository text production by adult PA native speakers. Specifically, we examine the distribution of action nouns to probe whether they can differentiate between varieties and modalities. Arabic is typically diglossic ( Ferguson 1959 ), where two varieties co-exist within the same speech community. Grammatical differences between varieties exist across all domains. Various studies examined differences between spoken Arabic varieties and MSA, but only few have examined them in actual usage in text production. Methodology is based on a cross-linguistic project on text construction ( Berman & Verhoeven 2002 ). 30 participants were shown a clip demonstrating conflicts, and were asked to produce texts based on it. Each participant produced six texts: three narrative and three expository texts in PA, spoken MSA (MSA SP) and written MSA (MSA W). Action nouns were coded according to roots, patterns, number of arguments and syntactic position. The results reveal significant differences in three domains: (i) Distribution: Action nouns reflected mainly variety-related differences, with MSA texts hosting more action nouns out of all content words and nouns; (ii) Number of arguments: Action nouns with no arguments were more common in PA, yet action nouns with two arguments were higher in MSA, and in some cases, higher in spoken than in written MSA; (iii) Syntactic position: Action nouns in direct object position were more frequent in PA, while action nouns in noun complement positions were more frequent in MSA. The results shed light on the actual usage of action nouns in texts hence serving as a diagnostic tool for variety differentiation (PA vs. MSA) and modality differentiation between (spoken vs. written texts). The study also provides evidence for the special status of spoken MSA as an intermediary variety between spoken PA and written MSA. The results suggest avenues for further corpus-based research on Arabic as well as applications for pedagogy.