Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Linguistics

Advisor

Gita Martohardjono

Committee Members

Gita Martohardjono

Sam Alxatib

Alberta Gatti

Subject Categories

Linguistics

Keywords

Heritage Language, Arabic, Active Participle, Aspect

Abstract

This study investigated the acquisition, development, and productivity of اسم الفاعل “ism il-fA؟el”, Active Participle (AP) when denoting ongoing aspect in the comprehension and production of heritage speakers (HSs) of Levantine Arabic (LA[1]).  Ongoing aspect is mainly realized in Arabic by an inflected imperfective verb preceded by a progressive particle (PROG.V) and in certain cases b AP. Our study is comprised of four sub-studies: a Syrian Levantine Arabic (SLA) adult corpus analysis (production of PROG.V and AP/ CACeC template); a cross-sectional LA child heritage comprehension and production experiment (PROG.V and AP/ CACeC template) ; a longitudinal study of two heritage speakers of SLA through 13 months (production of PROG.V and AP in different templates); and a LA adolescent and adult  heritage speaker cross-sectional elicitation task (production of PROG.V and AP in different templates). The adult SLA corpus analysis revealed that PROG.V is more frequent than AP (only the first template of the AP. i.e., CACeC فاعل was investigated). Findings from the LA child heritage speaker cross-sectional experiment confirmed accessibility to CACeC AP, providing evidence of availability of its mental representation. Results also showed better performance in comprehension compared to production, and more accuracy in PROG.V responses than AP. The longitudinal study also supports the Strong Continuity Hypothesis (SCH). The two children observed in the longitudinal study exhibited competence of different templates of AP and applied them correctly to express ongoing aspect. Finally, the adolescent and adult LA heritage speaker cross-sectional elicitation task, also provided evidence for SCH where most participants used different templates of AP, though their performance was better with PROG.V. Results of this latter study moreover exhibited that females performed better than males. In general, results and findings shed light on the heritage speakers’ morphosemantic competence of AP as an ongoing aspect marker, and the factors influencing their performance. Adopting The Network Analysis Approach, proposed by Dattner et al. (2022), we explored the relationships between roots/ lemmas in the lexicon and morphological templates (all represented as nodes with interconnecting lines in the original model), and between AP templates and their aspectual semantic application in LA (a linguistic variety characterized by a non-concatenative morphology). Building on The Strong Continuity Hypothesis (SCH) in language acquisition (Chomsky,1960s; Wexler, 1993 &1996; Hyams 1986 &1993; Flynn 1987, 1998 & 2004 ; Pinker, 1984; Lust, 1992, 1999 & 2006; Boser,1992; and Pierce,1992), we provided evidence that heritage speakers of LA have access to LA grammar from childhood (2-years old). Heritage grammar is not a simplified primitive version of the native monolingual speaker’s grammar, and it does not lack fundamental structural mental representations. It is rather a fully structured system that gradually matures with continuous input, by adding lexical and functional details. Heritage speakers of LA retain substantial grammatical knowledge, especially for high-frequency and semantically transparent forms. They, nonetheless, display areas of variability in the morphological realization of the ongoing aspect. Variations in production among heritage speakers are interpreted in relation to gender effects, and usage-based learning theories such as frequency of form (roots, lexemes/ lemmas, and templates); complexity of form-form interrelationships networking (a root/ lemma-morphological templates) and/ or form-function mapping (AP - ongoing aspect); and to crosslinguistic influence from the dominant language, English.  The findings in general contribute to ongoing debates in heritage language morphosemantic acquisition and development, with implications for both theoretical linguistics and educational and pedagogical practices.

[1] Levantine Arabic is an Arabic Dialect spoken in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan.

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