Exploring the links between relational bonds and customer loyalty : the case of loyal Arabic guests at five-star hotels

Relationship marketing aims to build and maintain relationships between customers and organizations. While building strong bonds is a key objective of relationship marketing, limited empirical attention has been paid to the role of relational bonds on enhancing loyalty. This study explores the impact of financial, social and structural bonds on consumer loyalty, using a sample of loyal Arabic hotel guests. The results of this study suggest that structural bonds increase loyalty, although financial and social bonds were not found to have a significant impact on loyalty.

Whey protein and gum arabic encapsulated Omega-3 lipids. The effect of material properties on coacervation

The effect of material properties on complex coacervation of whey protein and gum Arabic from various sources was investigated. In this study, it was demonstrated that material properties of whey protein isolates and gum Arabic affect the complex coacervation process significantly. For whey protein, the coacervation capability could be correlated with their level of denaturation and calcium content. For gum Arabic, both material sources and salt content were found to be attributing factors to their coacervation capability. This study facilitated the development of Omega-3 lipids microcapsules with promising performances in certain food applications.

Qabus ibn Wushmagir : a study of rhythm patterns in Arabic epistolary prose from the 4th century AH (10th century AD)

This study focuses on the Arabic prose style of Qabus ibn Wushmagir, a Persian ruler of the 4th century AH (10th century AD). Through a textual analysis of a selection of his letters it identifies some fascinating rhythmical patterns using the statistical technique of log-linear modelling. The quantitative analyses are based specifically on syllable patterns in the texts which are evaluated according to the theme of each letter. The study concludes that in some letter types in particular there is a certain predictability in the rhythmical patterns of the text which indicate that the style of a given piece was determined to some degree by the theme of the letter.

The sword and the pen in the pre-modern Arabic heritage : a literacy representation of an important historical relationship

The so-called "literary debate" in Greek, Latin and many Near Eastern
languages is a well-developed genre. In his 1987 article, Geert Jan van Gelder surveyed its background more than adequately, 1 and very few details of that paper need to be repeated here. He assessed thoroughly the historical contribution of numerous poets to the relationship between "the sword and the pen," and also analyzed various aspects of this relationship in a few prose texts.

A processability approach to agreement morphology in Arabic L2

This thesis tests the processability theory (PT) (Pienemann 1998;2005) predictions for agreement morphology in the acquisition of Arabic L2. The thesis has demonstrated that, apart from a few cases, learners of Arabic L2 acquired the test structures according to the PT's predictions for L2 sequential development.

Automatic rule induction in Arabic to English machine translation framework

This chapter addresses the exploitation of a supervised machine learning technique to automatically induce Arabic-to-English transfer rules from chunks of parallel aligned linguistic resources. The induced structural transfer rules encode the linguistic translation knowledge for converting an Arabic syntactic structure into a target English syntactic structure. These rules are going to be an integral part of an Arabic-English transfer-based machine translation. Nevertheless, a novel morphological rule induction method is employed for learning Arabic morphological rules that are applied in our Arabic morphological analyzer. To demonstrate the capability of the automated rule induction technique, we conducted rule-based translation experiments that use induced rules from a relatively small data set. The translation quality of the hybrid translation experiments achieved good results in terms of WER.

Request mitigating devices in Australian English and Iraqi Arabic : a comparative study

Speech acts realization in everyday interaction is seen as an important field to explore the impact of linguistic and cultural variations on cross-cultural communication and second language acquisition. The reported study investigates the use of request mitigating devices in Australian English and Iraqi Arabic. It explores the internal and external devices that speakers of the two languages use to mitigate the imposition force of requests and the impact of the linguistic and cultural parameters on this use. Request samples were collected from 14 native speakers of Australian English and 14 native speakers of Iraqi Arabic by means of eight role-play interviews. The mitigating devices were identified and classified according to a modified categorization scheme based on Blum-Kulka et al. (1989). Additional categories of mitigating devices were added to this scheme to meet the requirements of data analysis. These include consultative device (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1984), questions (Trosborg, 1995), apology (Economidou-Kogetsidis, 2008), alerter (Schauer, 2007), closing (Al-Ali & Alawneh, 2010), and new categories: wish/hope statement and verbal incentive. The results showed that internal mitigating devices were more frequent in Australian English requests than in Iraqi Arabic requests, while external mitigating devices were equally pervasive in both groups. The two groups also used different semantic formulae of some mitigating devices in specific situations. The pervasive occurrence of external mitigators in both groups‟ requests is discussed in terms of volubility as a politeness strategy. It is suggested that the divergence between the two groups in their utilization of request mitigations is related to linguistic and cultural variations between the Australian and Iraqi languages and cultures.

Request mitigating devices in Australian English and Iraqi Arabic : a comparative study

Significant issues, especially miscommunication in a cross-cultural setting and pragmatic failure in second language (L2) acquisition, stem from the linguistic and cultural differences between social groups. The investigation of speech acts realization in everyday situations is deemed as an important field to explore the impact of linguistic and cultural variations on cross-cultural communication and L2 acquisition. This paper examines the internal and external mitigating devices that Australian English native speakers (AENSs) and Iraqi Arabic native speakers (IANSs) use to soften the force of request speech acts in everyday situations. It aims to explore request mitigating devices employed in Australian English and Iraqi Arabic in terms of semantic formulae and frequencies in everyday interaction. Request samples were collected from native speakers of Australian English and Iraqi Arabic by means of role-play interviews. The mitigating devices found in requests were identified and classified. The results showed that internal mitigating devices were more frequent in AENSs’ requests than in IANSs’ requests, while external mitigating devices were pervasive in both groups. The two groups also used different semantic formulae of some mitigating devices in some situations. The pervasive occurrence of external mitigators in both groups’ requests is explained in terms of the notion of volubility as a politeness strategy. It is also suggested that the divergence between the two groups in their utilization of request mitigations is related to linguistic and cultural variations between the Australian and Iraqi cultures.