Grammatical agreement variation in Cairene Arabic

The goal of this dissertation is to describe patterns of grammatical agreement in Cairene Arabic. In particular, the investigation focuses on the variation between strict (plural) and deflected (feminine singular) agreement with both human and non-human plural heads in an effort to account for factors influencing speakers\u27 choice between the two. Tape-recorded naturalistic speech from sociolinguistic interviews constitute the primary data for the study. In order to supplement and explore hypotheses suggested by this corpus, some experiments were conducted to elicit native-speaker intuitions, directly and indirectly. A corpus of Old Arabic texts was also quantitatively analyzed in order to give a historical perspective on patterns of agreement in Cairene. The variation exhibited in both the Cairene and Old Arabic corpus was found to be systematic. Agreement variability appears to be a grammatical resource available to Cairenes to indicate their perception of the referents represented by a plural head; other factors, morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic, also figure significantly. Social factors were not found to play a clear role in vernacular Cairene agreement. From the standpoint of agreement, it would appear that Cairene is a natural development of Old Arabic as a result of common processes of language transmission, including contact-induced change. This study demonstrates that both the spoken language and the written language have undergone considerable changes, and that the agreement system of Cairene is, in some ways, closer to that of early Old Arabic than is that of its standardized cousin, Modern Standard Arabic