Mixed results are reported in the literature concerning the status of gender, as social factor, as a predictor of the degree of emphatic-plain contrast in Jordanian Arabic. The present study argues that these mixed results could be an outcome paying no or little attention to demographic factors, more specifically; the original regional dialect subjects belonged to before settling in Jordanian cities. The present study examines the effect of gender, in Amman City, on the realization of emphasis in the emphatic coronals /tʕ/ and /sʕ/ and their plain counterparts /t/ and /s/. The study depended on the first three formants of vowels adjacent to the target sounds after normalization for sex differences, Center of Gravity for target sounds, and Voice Onset Time (VOT) for the stops, as the acoustic cues of emphasis. The results from the mixed model, with “speaker” and “word” as random effect, indicated that gender is a reliable predictor of emphasis in Amman City as evident by the results from the first three vowel formants and stops’ VOT; while both males and females maintained a significant difference between emphatic and plain sounds, males maintained a greater emphatic-plain contrast than females.

This article is an attempt to explore and explain the complex processes and mechanisms involved in creating myth signs as presented in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1957) through an interdisciplinary and an interdiscursive approach. The article presupposes that the mythic system of signification occupies a liminal space of a multiplicity of disciplines and discourses. The mythic sign integrates a myriad of epistemological spaces philosophical, scientific, and cultural. Therefore, this article wants to cross the borderlines between fields of knowledge to understand the unique position of the mythic sign. We are going to use scientific discourse of virology to investigate the parasitic and viral nature of the mythic sign. Moreover, we investigate the role of the mythologist in exploring the signs that are infected by ideology and how to demystify their intentionality and artificiality. Finally, we are going to rely on quantum physics to investigate the superposition of the mythologist and the role this position plays in understanding the ambiguous and multidimensional nature of the mythic sign.

In this study, we examined the relationship between social factors and language by focusing on color terms. We investigated patterns of color terms’ use and the diversity of the color terms lexicon (CTL) among males and females belonging to different subcultures—city vs. small town or urban vs. rural—and different university majors—professionally color educated vs. others. Using an unconstrained color-naming task performed on a computer, three hundred and ninety-nine participants were asked to type in descriptions for fifteen color samples. The use of lexical items from Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in the color descriptions was also investigated. Uni/multivariant analyses of the data were carried out in order to test the association between the patterns of color terms and the social independent variables. Females, participants with professional education in colors, and participants from the city were found to have a larger and more diversified CTL than males, participants with no professional color education, and participants from small towns.