This essay discusses the use of trickster behavior in Harriet Jacobs and Lucy Delaney’s slave narratives. Their enslavement necessitated that they engage in, what I describe as literal and rhetorical tricksterism. Trickster behavior, an African cultural practice adapted by enslaved Africans and their descendants, encouraged multiple forms of deception demonstrated in slave narratives through behavior and rhetorical presentation. Because Jacobs’s narrative is frequently taught and evaluated, my discussion of Delaney’s narrative adds another dimension to the female slave experience. Full Article


 

This study compares the morpho-syntactic properties of the reciprocal and associative markers in Shona, against a background of the reciprocal and associative markers in Bantu. The study goes beyond previous studies both in Shona (e.g., Fortune 1982), and in Bantu (e.g., Kimenyi 1980) by making a comparison of the reciprocal and associative. The goal is to contribute to a better understanding of the reciprocal and the associative and to language typology. The study concludes that the reciprocal and associative markers are:
(i) in complementary distribution; (ii) closely related semantically; (iii) have the same grammatical functions; (iv) have different distributional properties.  Full Article


 

Though self-efficacy is an important contributor to success in foreign language education, its relationship with learners’ self-assessment abilities and perceptions has not been adequately researched. This pilot study correlated students’ self-efficacy beliefs about learning a foreign language with self-assessment ratings regarding an awareness of study habits and the importance of classroom learning topics. Results showed a significant positive relationship between students’ self-assessment scores and their global (but not
task-specific) self-efficacy beliefs about future foreign language success.  Full Article

Lexicalized Names and Nouns in Jordanian Arabic: A Sociolinguistic and Translational View
Bakri Al-Azzam, Majed Al-Quran, Marwan Obeidat, Aladdin Kharabsheh
 

Lexicalization occupies a central place in the development of the lexicon of languages, as it is highly pervasive cross-linguistically. This study addresses lexicalized names and nouns in Colloquial Arabic, as the phenomenon is notably self-evident in the formation of new lexical items through borrowing from either the standard variety of Arabic or from an alien source, mainly Turkish. Taken as stems, words from these lending varieties are lexicalized to coin new words and consequently are institutionalized within the everyday use. These include eponyms from the standard variety and nouns from a foreign source. More specifically, it is an attempt to identify these cases and analyze the morphological restructuring in addition to the encoding system they have gone through at the semantic level. Moreover, it shows that the lexicalized names and nouns have gained enough social understanding, which has helped to preserve them alive among whole social groups. Since most of the borrowed names have culture specific implications, they pose a challenge
to their translatability, another major concern of the study.  Full Article