UC Irvine

My dissertation investigates the role of communicative efficiency in shaping linguistic form, bringing evidence from Arabic and Arabizi across different levels of linguistic structures. Chapter 1 reviews the essential background needed for the study of communicative efficiency. In Chapter 2, I examine whether the rate at which speakers modify nouns with adjectives is affected by adjective position relative to the noun by conducting a corpus analysis of English, Spanish, and Arabic Wikipedia, as well as a broad analysis of 74 languages in the Universal Dependencies treebanks. In Chapter 3, I test whether the adjective ordering preferences well established for languages with pre-nominal adjectives also hold in Arabic, a language with post-nominal modification through behavioral experiments for both baseline native Arabic speakers and heritage Arabic speakers. In Chapter 4, I test whether contextual predictability shapes vowel dropping in Arabizi, the Romanized Arabic script used in digital communication, comparing private chat data with public Twitter data. Together, the three studies show that the efficiency pressures documented in English and other well-studied languages are also at work in Arabic, while revealing that their expression is modulated by the communicative context.