A linguistic and literary analysis of the writings of Arab Americans in English

This dissertation investigates the different strategies which Arab American writers used in their writings in English in order to express or convey Arab culture. I used a combination of linguistic and literary analyses. Within the linguistic analysis I use discourse analysis as explained by Brown and Yule (1983) and I also employed insights from Dell Hymes ethnography of communications approach (1974). Discourse analysis analyzed the functions and purposes of language instead of merely analyzing their linguistic forms.; In addition I also used literary analysis to investigate the different literary devices used by the creative writers to convey culture. And to show how bilingual literature serves to express culture to both the monolingual speaker as well as the bilingual speaker.