Marwan Jarrah
Biographic Data
| ID | 321104 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marwan Jarrah |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marwan |
| FAMILY NAME | Jarrah |
| SIGNATURE | JARRAH M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Jordan |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1528-7326 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 75 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 32 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 75 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Negotiating Neutrality on Collaborative Knowledge Platforms: Discursive Strategies and Ideological Bias in Wikipedia’s Portrayal of Prophet Muhammad
This study examines how the English Wikipedia article on Prophet Muhammad negotiates neutrality and epistemic authority. Using a single-case design, it analyzes an archived revision through Critical Discourse Analysis, drawing on Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework, Entman’s framing theory, and Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model. The analysis was organized around six categories: foregrounding of controversy, backgrounding of spirituality, epis…
Reweighting Please: Requestive Bridging Devices in Arabic–English Spoken and Digital Requests
This study examines whether Arabic–English bilinguals use please and comparable Arabic request-related markers as a shared resource across different request contexts. It asks whether such use is higher than in Arabic-dominant baseline production, whether it differs across spoken and digital interaction, and whether it is linked to bilingual experience, especially intensity of English use. Sixty adults produced about 1,200 requests in spoken role-…
Performing gender in digital spaces: Verbal and multimodal compliment strategies among Jordanian Facebook users
Mobility, Borrowing, and Identity: A Sociolinguistic Study of Gulf Arabic Influence on Jordanian Returnees’ Arabic
This study investigates how extended residence in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries reshapes the lexical repertoire of Jordanian Arabic speakers after returning to Jordan. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and a picture-naming task with 30 returnees, the research documents the extent, distribution, and social meanings of Gulf Arabic borrowings. Using a variationist framework informed by Labovian principles and contact-linguistic theory…
Euphemistic language and strategic communication in televised political election debates during Jordan’s 2024 elections
This study examines the use and pragmatic impact of euphemistic strategies in 15 televised debate episodes aired during the campaign period preceding Jordan’s 2024 parliamentary elections. Through a qualitative content analysis, it shows how Jordanian political party secretaries strategically manipulate language to discuss politically sensitive topics. The analysis shows that synonymy, circumlocution and metaphor were the most salient strategies.…
Bridging meaning and context: A pragmatic study of parenthetical explications in Qur’anic translation
This study examines explicature construction in the English translation of the Qur’an, focusing on parenthetical insertions in the Hilali-Khan version. These additions make implicit meanings explicit, guiding readers through culturally and theologically dense material. Applying Huang’s (2014) framework, the analysis categorizes these insertions into five types: disambiguation, reference resolution, saturation, free enrichment, and ad hoc concept …
Blended learning with AI role-play in English for tourism and hospitality
This mixed-methods quasi-experimental study examined whether AI-mediated role-play could support complaint-handling performance in an English for Tourism and Hospitality course. The study was conducted with 89 intermediate-level undergraduate EFL students at a public university in Jordan. Students were assigned by class section to a control group that completed instructor-led role-play and an experimental group that engaged in AI-mediated role-pl…
Initial self-assessment calibration and post-baseline L2 speech comprehensibility trajectories: A secondary longitudinal analysis with explanatory learner reflections
This secondary longitudinal study examined whether early calibration between self-assessed and externally rated comprehensibility was associated with subsequent L2 speech comprehensibility growth across one semester. Using de-identified classroom data from 160 Jordanian EFL learners (558 learner-wave observations; 3348 ratings), the study combined mixed-effects modeling and brief post-task reflections. In the primary baseline-adjusted model, Wave…
From world Englishes to Hyperlingua: English as infrastructural governance in Jordan and the Middle East
Purpose This article examines how English is built into policy, digital, and academic governance systems in Jordan and selected Middle Eastern comparator contexts. It argues that English now functions less as a discretionary communicative resource than as an infrastructural condition of participation, recognition, and mobility. Design/methodology/approach The study combines Critical Language Policy and Critical Discourse Analysis to examine a pur…
Ritualised insistence and gendered moral personhood in Jordanian Arabic
Introduction This study examines ritualised gift-receiving in Jordanian Arabic as a site for the enactment of gendered moral personhood rather than merely a matter of politeness management. Methods Drawing on semi-structured interviews and scenario-based interactional reconstructions with 40 native speakers, equally divided by gender, the study analyses how participants respond linguistically to gifts and favours in everyday service and semi-serv…
Stylistics of Resistance: Qur’anic Intertextuality in the Poetry of Mahmoud Darwish
This article offers a stylistic analysis of Qur’anic intertextuality in the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, examining how sacred discourse is recontextualized to articulate exile, resistance, and identity. Drawing on literary stylistics and intertextual theory, the study explores how Darwish integrates Qur’anic diction, syntactic echoes, and rhetorical structures to construct a poetic voice that engages both cultural memory and political critique. The…
Identity, Agency, and Human–AI Mediation in L2 Academic Writing: An Interactional Study
Generative language models are increasingly used in academic writing, yet research on AI-assisted writing often reduces them to instructional tools or feedback providers and relies mainly on outcomes or self-reports. This study instead examines human–AI coordination as the analytic focus and conceptualizes composing as a distributed activity involving writers, prompts, system outputs, and evolving drafts. Drawing on human–computer interaction and…
Preventive Pragmatics in Jordanian Arabic: Regulating Fear, Belief, and the Unseen
This article examines how speakers of Jordanian Arabic pragmatically regulate discourse about supernatural entities known as jinn, treating such discourse as a socially consequential domain where fear, normativity, and belief intersect. Drawing on ethnographically grounded interactional data, the study identifies a structured repertoire of preventive pragmatic acts, including apotropaic invocations, Qurʾanic supplications, metapragmatic prohibiti…
On ad hoc concept construction and impoliteness mitigation: Evidence from Jordanian Arabic
This study examines how ad hoc concept construction mitigates impoliteness in Jordanian Arabic. Drawing on Relevance Theory and lexical pragmatics, it analyzes how hearers pragmatically adjust conventionalized expressions in face-threatening contexts to derive context-specific meanings. The data come from naturally occurring conversations across informal, workplace, and public settings. From approximately 500 candidate instances, 21 recurrent lex…
Attitudes toward Spanish as added linguistic capital in Jordan's English-dominant higher education landscape
This study investigates emerging attitudes toward Spanish language education in Jordan, focusing on perspectives from parents, community stakeholders, and employers. Despite the global expansion of Spanish as a major international language, little empirical research has examined how it is evaluated and positioned in English-dominant, non-Hispanic contexts in the Middle East. While English remains the dominant linguistic capital and a prerequisite…
Defaults and agreement: Feature valuation in Arabic and French
This paper investigates the mechanics of φ-feature valuation by comparing agreement patterns in French and Arabic, showing how differences in [± human ] specification regulate the outcomes of the Agree operation. French exhibits maximally transparent agreement: probes fully value φ-features regardless of the controller’s [± human ] specification. In Arabic, [+ plural , − human ] controllers, whether animate or inanimate, regularly yield deflected…
Whose English counts? Linguistic justice, gatekeeping, and AI-mediated language policy in academic publishing
Academic publishing has long served as a site of language regulation, shaping which knowledge becomes publishable, under what linguistic conditions, and at what cost. The normalization of generative artificial intelligence sharpens these concerns, as AI tools are now increasingly entangled with manuscript preparation, editorial screening, and peer-review governance. This article examines AI-mediated academic publishing as an emerging domain of la…
Native and Non‐Native Teachers of Second Language Pronunciation
This chapter examines the ongoing debate surrounding the roles and professional legitimacy of native (NS) and non‐native speaker (NNS) teachers in second language (L2) pronunciation instruction. Challenging the traditional binary distinction, we argue that native‐speakerism—a belief in the superiority of NS teachers—has long fostered discriminatory practices in English language teaching. Drawing on scholarly literature, we trace the historical an…
Cultural nuances in subtitling the religious discourse marker wallah in Jordanian drama into English
This study examines the strategies and challenges of subtitling the religious discourse marker والله wallah (by God) in Jordanian Arabic drama on Netflix. Two works, the series Jinn (2019) and the film Theeb (2014), are chosen as the corpus of the data. The study analyses the pragmatic functions of the religious marker wallah , which Arabs usually use to swear to God in different contexts and examines its English subtitles. The theoretical framew…
Real-world experiences of online learning: The effect of synchronous online learning on university students’ classroom engagement
While the effect of online learning on students’ academic achievement has been extensively studied, the impact of synchronous online instruction on students’ class engagement has not received enough attention in mainstream literature. This study addresses this gap and explores how the adoption of synchronous online learning has influenced Jordanian university students’ class engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study adopted a mixed-metho…
Algorithmic feedback and multilingual identity: Translanguaging practices in Jordanian EFL academic writing
This study examines how multilingual EFL students and instructors in a Jordanian university respond to AI-mediated writing support using translanguaging practices. Through a qualitative multi-case design, the research draws on interviews, classroom observations, writing samples, AI-generated feedback, and instructor journals. The findings show that students do not simply follow AI suggestions; instead, they assess them critically, adjusting or di…
“They know AI, but they also know us”: Student perceptions of EFL teacher identity in AI-enhanced classrooms in Jordan
Introduction The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in education is reshaping classroom practices and teacher identity, particularly in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts. This study investigates undergraduate perceptions of how AI impacts EFL teacher roles in Jordanian classrooms. Methods Using a qualitative design, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 third- and fourth-year EFL students at the University of Jorda…
On the social meanings of avoiding fully-articulated explicatures and the role of pragmatics in utterance explication
The term ‘explicatures’ pertains to the inferential developments made of utterances with the objective of attaining a greater degree of clarity by the speaker (Sperber and Wilson 1986). It was first introduced by relevance theory to provide evidence that the explicit part of communication may contain a pragmatically inferred material, which facilitates communication and makes it more relevant (Carston. 2000. Explicature and semantics. UCL Working…
She Has The Heart!’ Communicative Strategies of the Linguistic Expressions of Illnesses in Jordanian Arabic and the Effect of Religion in Their Manifestation
This article explores how illnesses are linguistically expressed in Jordanian Arabic (JA). It also investigates the extent to which religion and social norms influence this expression. To this end, we collected authentic data from a number of interactions of JA speakers, particularly within interactive radio and TV programs addressing various life issues, where discussions about illness arise. A total of 834 linguistic expressions of illnesses we…
Low topics are not IP-external: A reply to Alzayid (2025)
This article defends the hypothesis that right-dislocated elements in Najdi Arabic (NA) are IP-internal low topics, contra Alzayid's (2025) recent claims of their IP-external status (Alzayid, Ali. 2025. On low topics in Najdi Arabic: A rejoinder to Alshamari and Jarrah (2022). Linguistics 63.6). Through a critical evaluation of Alzayid’s three empirical arguments – centred on NPI licensing, subject-verb agreement in VOS configurations, and wh-foc…
Record your Agree: A case study of the Arabic complementizer ʔinn
This research investigates the morpho-syntactic behaviour of the Arabic complementizer ʔinn in a range of Arabic varieties (Modern Standard Arabic, Jordanian Arabic, and Lebanese Arabic). It essentially argues that this complementizer shares (not donates or keeps , pace Ouali 2008, 2011) its unvalued $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}$ -features with its complement $\text{T}^{0}$ , something that makes ʔinn and $\text{T}^{0}$ separate agreeing heads. An inf…
Factivity and subject extraction in Jordanian Arabic
Evil-eye expressive strategies between utterers and interpreters: A pragmatic study on Colloquial Jordanian Arabic
In favour of the low IP area in the Arabic clause structure: Evidence from the VSO word order in Jordanian Arabic
Variation in verbal negation in Jordanian Arabic: A corpus-based analysis
(Im)politeness as a tool to categorize interactive discourse markers of Arabic in radio shows
Little research has related DMs to (im)politeness, and none in Jordanian Arabic (JA). This study provides evidence that (im)politeness can categorize interactive DMs into polite DMs and impolite DMs in JA. It aims to explore the use of DMs in JA in relation to (im)politeness dichotomy. Twenty-two episodes of three different Jordanian radio shows which use vernacular JA were recorded and transcribed. With the help of prosodic cues and native speak…
Lying Detection Through Reality Monitoring: Evidence from Jordanian Arabic
Mobilizing Faith: Religious inscriptions, vernacular identity, and urban belonging in Jordan
This study investigates the use of religious inscriptions displayed on cars in Jordan as a visual-linguistic practice that indexes Islamic identity in public space. Drawing on Social Identity Theory and material semiotics, the research analyses 126 religious inscriptions documented over four months, supplemented by semi-structured interviews with 50 vehicle owners/drivers. The findings reveal that these inscriptions serve multiple functions: apot…
On The Social Use Of ‘Urban Ammani Arabic’ By Adult Female Speakers In The Amman Metropolitan Area
This article examines the significant phenomenon of the use of what we term "Urban Ammani Arabic" (UAA) by most adult female speakers in the Amman metropolitan area, particularly when this dialect differs from the one they acquire or use in their domestic environments. To explore this, 132 adult female speakers were selected to participate in both sociolinguistic and semi-structured interviews. These interviews aimed to uncover the metapragmatic …
Prosodic words are the domain of emphasis spread: Evidence from Northern Rural Jordanian Arabic
This article, which reports on an experimental study based on data obtained from 86 native speakers of Northern Rural Jordanian Arabic (NRJA), offers empirical evidence that emphasis spread can apply bidirectionally across word edges when they are prosodically word internal. In other words, emphasis can spread from one word to a neighboring (plain) word when the two words form one prosodic word (ω). In order to support this hypothesis, we examine…
The fine structure of low topics in Najdi Arabic
This article explores the low IP area of Najdi Arabic, with special reference to a construction involving a post-verbal object that is resumed on the verb (as in 'The man saw-her the woman'). We provide evidence that the object is a topic in the low IP area in such cases. However, the position of the object in the low IP area is masked by the movement of the verb to T0 or, in some cases (if T0 is lexically filled) to the head of the low Focus Phr…
When a General Classifier Acts as a Quantifier? The Case ofĦabbit'a Grain of' in Jordanian Arabic
This article offers a morphosyntactic account of the observation that the general dividing classifier ħabbit 'a grain of' in Jordanian Arabic (JA) can express another unpredictable interpretation when it is combined with non-count nominals. When ħabbit occurs with nominals that refer to [-animate] collectives (granular aggregates, legumes, nuts and seeds), it can give rise to individuation or paucal quantification. On the other hand, when it occu…
Humor and the Creative Use of English Expressions in the Speech of University Students: A Case From Jordan
The present study examines the use of English lexical insertions to create humor by Jordanian university students. The data of the study are collected from spontaneous tape-recorded conversations from 62 participants of both males and females, representing different age groups (from 18-23 years old) and belonging to different specializations (e.g., engineering, pharmacy, mathematics, business, and English). The recorded conversations are qualitat…
A Criterial Freezing approach to subject extraction in Jordanian Arabic
Using the Criterial Freezing approach to movement and chain formation (Rizzi 2005, 2006, 2014; Rizzi and Shlonsky 2006, 2007), this study explores the strategies Jordanian Arabic makes available for subject extraction. I argue that subject extraction in this variety of Arabic is constrained by the postulated D-linking condition of the Subject Criterion – i.e., [spec,SubjP] is filled by an element with the same D(iscourse)-linking status as that o…
Record your Agree: A case study of the Arabic complementizer ʔinn
This research investigates the morpho-syntactic behaviour of the Arabic complementizer ʔinn in a range of Arabic varieties (Modern Standard Arabic, Jordanian Arabic, and Lebanese Arabic). It essentially argues that this complementizer shares (not donates or keeps , pace Ouali 2008, 2011) its unvalued $\unicode[STIX]{x1D719}$ -features with its complement $\text{T}^{0}$ , something that makes ʔinn and $\text{T}^{0}$ separate agreeing heads. An inf…
Forthcoming articles
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On dissolving the A/A-bar distinction and the status of preverbal DPs in NSLs: A reply to Alahdal
A prosodic account of wh-formation in Jordanian Arabic
Factivity and subject extraction in Jordanian Arabic
ɸ-agreement within Construct State in Jordanian Arabic
This paper shows that the head noun of the Construct State may ɸ-agree (in Number and Gender) with the accompanying DP associate in Jordanian Arabic. When it occurs, this agreement is, however, only invoked when the DP associate is referential (e.g., galam ʔil-walad ‘the boy’s pen’> galam uh i ʔil-walad i , but barbiiʃ ʔil-ʁaaz ‘the gas pipe’> *barbiiʃ -uh i ʔil-ʁaaz i ). The paper provides a syntactic account of this observation which clearly de…
Institutional adoption of blended learning on a budget
Purpose This research paper aims to explore blended learning implementation in universities that are on a low budget, essentially determining the more important steps to invest during the initial stage of implementation and investing in costly IT infrastructure or training faculty for student-centred learning and relevant pedagogies. Design/methodology/approach A survey of 254 students at the University of Jordan (UJ) has been administered. Stude…
Humor and the Creative Use of English Expressions in the Speech of University Students: A Case From Jordan
The present study examines the use of English lexical insertions to create humor by Jordanian university students. The data of the study are collected from spontaneous tape-recorded conversations from 62 participants of both males and females, representing different age groups (from 18-23 years old) and belonging to different specializations (e.g., engineering, pharmacy, mathematics, business, and English). The recorded conversations are qualitat…
A multi-locus analysis of Arabic negation: Micro-variation in Southern Levantine, Gulf and Standard Arabic
Grammatical Encoding of Discourse Structure: A Case Study of The Arabic Discourse Particle Tara
This study shows that the discourse particle tara in Jordanian Arabic identifies whether its utterance presents new or given information. In other words, there exists a relation between the presence of this particle (i.e. its position) and the type of information packaging of its utterance. When tara appears utterance‐initially, the accompanying utterance is presented as being in sentence focus (i.e. as all‐new). By contrast, when tara appears ut…
Two Types of Concession: Evidence From Discourse Markers
This study investigates the use of concessive discourse markers (DMs) in Jordanian Arabic (JA), particularly relying on a corpus analysis of naturally occurring data. It argues that there are mainly two types of concession in JA: extrinsic concession and intrinsic concession. The two types of concession are shown to differ from each other with respect to Kratzer’s compatibility of propositions. Intrinsic concession occurs when a speaker has a man…
In favour of the low IP area in the Arabic clause structure: Evidence from the VSO word order in Jordanian Arabic
The position of the broken plural in the grammar: Rural Jordanian Arabic as a case study
Emphatic assimilation across morpheme boundaries in Jordanian Arabic
This study aims to examine emphatic assimilation across morpheme boundaries in Jordanian Arabic (JA). Our research is based on word-list data comprising 86 words uttered by 12 native speakers of JA, recorded and acoustically analyzed in Praat for a total of 1032 tokens. The consonants of the bound morphemes tested include the genitive/accusative suffix-initial consonant /h/, the active participle prefix-final consonant /t/, and the definite artic…
Discourse markers within sentence grammar: Further evidence from ʕaad in Jordanian Arabic
This article investigates the discourse functions of ʕaad in Jordanian Arabic (JA), based on a naturally occurring corpus which consists of 20 sociolinguistic interviews with 60 participants. Upon analysing all occurrences of ʕaad in the corpus, we propose that ʕaad is a discourse marker that provides supplementary information that relates the speaker's attitude (i.e., disagreement) to the proposition expressed by the host sentence. Additionally,…
A sociolinguistic analysis of intensifiers in Ammani Arabic
This study aims to identify the intensifiers used in Ammani Arabic (henceforth AA) and to explore whether or not their use is socially constrained by age, gender, and education. Furthermore, the study attempts to find whether the use of intensifiers throughout this dialect is internally constrained through the examination of the effects of a set of linguistic factors (i.e., the semantic class of adjectives, the function of adjectives [attributive…
The syntax of the diminutive morpheme -aaj in Egyptian Arabic, Syrian Arabic, and Jordanian Arabic
This article investigates the morphosyntactic behavior of the diminutive morpheme -aaj in three Arabic dialects (Egyptian Arabic, Syrian Arabic, and Jordanian Arabic). It argues that this morpheme is categorially a head that projects Size Phrase (cf. De Belder, Marijke. 2008. Size matters: Towards a syntactic decomposition of countability. In Natasha Abner & Jason Bishop (eds.), Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics …
No case tampering once transfer domain is formed
This research article offers empirical evidence from Standard Arabic (SA) that an existing structural case assigned on an element by one head can be overridden by a new structural case assigned by a different head as long as the element (or one of its copies) has not become part of any previous transfer domain defined by the Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC) (see Chomsky, Noam. 2000. Minimalist inquiries: The framework. In Roger Martin, David…
(Im)politeness as a tool to categorize interactive discourse markers of Arabic in radio shows
Little research has related DMs to (im)politeness, and none in Jordanian Arabic (JA). This study provides evidence that (im)politeness can categorize interactive DMs into polite DMs and impolite DMs in JA. It aims to explore the use of DMs in JA in relation to (im)politeness dichotomy. Twenty-two episodes of three different Jordanian radio shows which use vernacular JA were recorded and transcribed. With the help of prosodic cues and native speak…
The fine structure of low topics in Najdi Arabic
This article explores the low IP area of Najdi Arabic, with special reference to a construction involving a post-verbal object that is resumed on the verb (as in 'The man saw-her the woman'). We provide evidence that the object is a topic in the low IP area in such cases. However, the position of the object in the low IP area is masked by the movement of the verb to T0 or, in some cases (if T0 is lexically filled) to the head of the low Focus Phr…
When a General Classifier Acts as a Quantifier? The Case ofĦabbit'a Grain of' in Jordanian Arabic
This article offers a morphosyntactic account of the observation that the general dividing classifier ħabbit 'a grain of' in Jordanian Arabic (JA) can express another unpredictable interpretation when it is combined with non-count nominals. When ħabbit occurs with nominals that refer to [-animate] collectives (granular aggregates, legumes, nuts and seeds), it can give rise to individuation or paucal quantification. On the other hand, when it occu…
Effects of gender and degree of formality on the use of euphemistic strategies in Iraqi Arabic
Although euphemism has been studied in many Arabic dialects, it has not yet received due attention in Iraqi Arabic (IA). This study investigates the use of euphemistic strategies by IA speakers and the effect of gender and degree of formality on the use of these strategies. In order to achieve these objectives, a discourse completion test (DCT) was developed and distributed to 160 (80 males and 80 females) Iraqi university students. The data were…
Engagement strategies in English and Arabic newspaper editorials
This study explores the use and functions of engagement strategies in English and Arabic newspaper editorials. To this end, the study analyses 80 editorials collected from two popular newspapers (40 from each): The Guardian which publishes in English and appears in the UK and Addustour which publishes in Arabic and appears in Jordan. Following Paltridge’s (2020) taxonomy, the study utilises a mixed-method approach to assess whether differences in…
The efficacy of the type of instruction on second language pronunciation acquisition
This study investigates the efficacy of the type of instruction (i.e., perception-based vs. production-based) on second language (L2) pronunciation acquisition in an English as a foreign language (EFL) context. To achieve this objective, 60 tertiary-level Jordanian learners of English were recruited and put into two groups (30 learners in each group). Group A received 6 weeks of perception-based instruction on both segmental and suprasegmental as…
Linguistics (47 works) · Philosophy (36 works) · Computer Science (35 works) · Arabic (31 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (30 works) · Psychology (28 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (22 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (19 works) · Natural Language Processing Techniques (14 works) · Mathematics (13 works)