The primary objective of this study is to examine the connotation of pet expressions when used to describe people in Jordanian Spoken Arabic (JSA), that is, the wide array of negative and positive associations that pet expressions bring with them. When defining animals,al-mu‘jamal-wasi:tt and al-mu‘jamal-jami‘ define most of the animal expressions along with their connotations. The present study investigates the connotations of pets in Jordanian Spoken Arabic. To this end, the researchers distributed an open ended questionnaire to the subjects that could provide rich qualitative data. This, in turn, will give the researchers an opportunity to gain insight in the subjects’ opinions on the connotation of pets in JSA. The questionnaire consisted of (11) Jordanian spoken Arabic sentences. Each sentence included a pet expression which is used in JSA. After collecting the questionnaire the researchers tested the connotations of pet expressions in JSA against the connotation of pet expression in al-mu‘jamal-wasi:tt and al-mu‘jam al-jami‘ .The findings of the study suggest that in some cases the connotation changed from positive in the two lexicons to negative in JSA or vice versa. In others, the connotation remained the same but changed from a connotation to another.

Liaison in Arabic applies to words that end with the feminine marker /t/ even in masculine nouns and adjectives when they happen to have the feminine ending. In this paper, we study liaison in Jordanian Arabic (JA) and Standard Arabic (SA) from the standpoint of syntax-prosody interface. We study the mapping of syntactic phrases onto phonological ones when this process takes place. We argue that liaison in JA is syntactically governed; it occurs only in construct state nominals (CSNs). We compare our finding in JA to those of Standard Arabic (SA). We also present evidence that JA marks right edges of phonological phrase in this phrase-level phonological process. We account for the differences between CSNs, where liaison applies, and other noun phrases where it does not. Finally, we discuss liaison with enchainêment which occurs when the second word of the construct state begins with the definite article Aal.

There are a number of helping verbs in Jordanian Arabic that are confused with light verbs or serial verbs. This paper, first, establishes the criteria on which they have been identified as auxiliary verbs. The paper shows the similarities and differences between the inflection of lexical verbs and AUX's in JA. It also tackles the loss of θassigning properties which is the crucial property that differentiates between AUX and lexical and serial verbs. Second, given the fact that Arabic has rich verbal morphology which provides enough justification for factoring TP into TP and AspP (and perhaps AgrP), the study adopts an articulated version of the IP, in which inflection is separated into its constituent components, each has a maximal functional projection. The study also builds on Ouhalla's proposal (1990, 2005) that auxiliaries originate outside the VP shell. Based on evidence from the distribution of VP adverbs, negation and floating quantifiers, the paper proposes that auxiliaries in Jordanian Arabic are classified under two lexical auxiliary groups. T-aux are borne in a functional projection under T, but raise to T 0 to carry and reflect tense, while Asp-aux are base-generated under Asp 0 and only raise to T in the absence of a T-Aux.

Jordanian Arabic exhibits three forms of negation: preverbal, discontinuous and post-verbal.  In this paper, we show how these three forms of negation could be accounted for from an OT perspective. Concisely, our main goal is to find out form-specific ranking(s) of the set of universal constraints that condition negation in this dialect. We argue that negation is tense-dependent in this dialect (viz. different tense forms opt for different constraint rankings). We propose a set of universal constraints that constrain the native speaker’s choice of the negation pattern(s) with the verb form. Additionally, we demonstrate how these constraints militate against each other to let only the optimal forms surface with each tense. The paper found that one major difference between negated present and past tense is that NegFirst is ranked very low in present verbs but very high in past verbs. Second, *Neg2 and max 3μ interact to block future circumflex negation forms in future verbs.  Third, the morph-syntactic expression of negation was found to be subject to weight in that the negators are maximally tri-moraic, a condition which explains why long ma: cannot be a viable alternative when circumflexing negation either with present or past verbs.

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