This thesis, entitled "A Comparative Syntactic Analysis of Word Order Variations in Baghdad Arabic and Mosul Arabic: Investigating Regional Syntax," addresses a significant gap in Arabic dialectology: the lack of systematic comparative research on constituent order across major Iraqi Arabic dialects. While word order alternation between Verb–Subject–Object (VSO) and Subject–Verb–Object (SVO) has been extensively studied in Modern Standard Arabic and select Arabic dialects, Iraqi varieties—particularly Mosul Arabic—remain underrepresented in the syntactic literature. The study adopted a mixed-method, cross-sectional design combining qualitative syntactic analysis with quantitative frequency description. Data were collected from 45 native speakers (22 from Baghdad, 23 from Mosul) through semi-structured interviews, a picture-description task, and a story-retelling task, yielding a corpus of approximately 3,800 analyzable verbal clauses. Clauses were coded for word order category, clause type, subject type, and discourse function, with inter-rater reliability confirmed through Cohen's Kappa (κ = 0.79–0.91). Results show that SVO is the predominant word order in both dialects (41.4% in Baghdad Arabic, 38.0% in Mosul Arabic), but Mosul Arabic exhibits a significantly higher rate of VSO (34.5% vs. 28.0%, χ² = 18.43, p < .001) across all clause types and discourse functions. Subject definiteness and pronominality strongly predict preverbal placement in both dialects, though this effect is weaker in Mosul Arabic. Discourse-functional analysis further confirms that topic-continuation contexts favor SVO while event-reporting contexts favor VSO in both varieties. The study concludes that Mosul Arabic exhibits a substantially higher and more structurally pervasive rate of VSO word order than Baghdad Arabic, reflecting distinct syntactic weighting and discourse-functional tendencies between the two dialects rather than a uniform Iraqi Arabic word-order system. These findings contribute to Iraqi Arabic dialect documentation, expand the empirical base for Arabic syntactic theory, and offer practical implications for language pedagogy and dialect-sensitive natural language processing.
