The aim of this paper is to provide a minimalist account of object displacement in terms of its trigger and its landing site in the syntactic tree structure of Standard Arabic (SA) clauses. The account utilizes Chomsky's concept of edge feature (EF) within the Minimalist Program and Rizzi's Split-CP analysis. In terms of its data scope, the paper is limited to a class of data identified as displaying the Verb -Object -Subject (VOS) order wherein the object is a full DP (not a pronominal clitic), and appears in a position preceding the subject. It will be argued that this order is the result of focus displacement of the object from its canonical position inside VP across the subject DP to the outer periphery of vP. The result of this operation is a marked order VOS driven by the vP edge feature (EF) to achieve the pragmatic function of focus.

This study aims at identifying the common types of errors in Google Translate (GT) in the translation of informative news texts from Arabic to English, to measure the translation errors quality and to assess the fluency and the semantic adequacy of the translation output, and therefore to explain the extent a human translator is needed to rectify the output translation. For this purpose, some examples were purposively selected from online newspapers. The collected data was analyzed using a mixed method approach, as the errors were qualitatively identified, guided by Hsu’s (2014) classification of machine translation errors. Quantitative descriptive approach was used to measure the translation errors quality, using the Multidimensional Quality Metrics and Localization Quality Evaluation. As for assessing the semantic adequacy and fluency, a questionnaire that was adapted from Dorr, Snover, and Madnani (2011) was used. The results of the analysis show that omission, which is a lexical error and inappropriate lexical choice, which is a semantic error are the most common errors. Inappropriate lexical choice is sometimes a result of the homophonic nature of some source text words which can be misinterpreted by the machine translation system. This study concludes that it is useful to use machine translation systems to expedite the translation process, but that accuracy is sacrificed for the sake of ease (less work for the human) and speed of translation. If greater accuracy is required, or desired, a human translator must at least proofread and work on the material.

Adopting the Cartography research program (Rizzi, 1997, 2001, 2004), the present work investigates the CP layer in Standard Arabic (SA); specifically, the nature and position of topicalized and object focused phrases in the left periphery. The paper also seeks to establish that in fact subjects, like objects and obliques, can also topicalize, the difference being that the pronoun is optionally lexically expressed in subject-topicalization. The ‘Subject’ initial-DP will be treated as a topic located high up in the clausal structure - in the specifier position of the Top node above Foc. Elements in this position fill a special pragmatic sense and discourse role of being presumed, given and identifiable topics rather than an argument or a thematic function. Building on Rizzi's (2004) and Ouhalla's (1997) proposals that generate moved objects and wh -phrases in [Spec, Foc], two focus positions will be posited for SA – one is located immediately above v P and the second is right below TopP. It will be proposed that object movement over the subject is triggered by the [F] feature on Foc and derives the VOS order. Triggered by the higher [F] feature, the raised object and the raised wh -word can raise again to the higher [Spec, Foc]. It is concluded that the position occupied by topicalized DP's differs from that of focused DP's. In particular, SA topics occupy a higher position in the left periphery, namely [Spec, TopP].

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Abstract-The linguistic element ‫؟‬adi is extensively employed in the variety of Arabic spoken in Iraq to aid in communication and facilitate the cohesion and flow of conversation. ‫؟‬adi which roughly means no worries, okay, how dare you?, yeah I hear you, or I've gone through the same thing myself, displays properties typically displayed by discourse markers. For example, it occurs phrase-initially or phrase-finally, it is a grammatically optional lexical item, it is multi-functional and it is an essential feature of spontaneous oral discourse … oralrather than formal written -discourse among Iraqi speakers of Arabic. The aim of this paper is to investigate the use of ‫؟‬adi, its distribution and its varied context-dependent meanings and functions. The description and investigation are based largely on speech samples which the author recorded. These recordings were then transcribed and analyzed in order to identify the functions associated with ‫؟‬adi from a discourse analytical perspective.