Information Structure in Spoken Arabic

Jonathan Owens, Alaa Elgibali

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135968397
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book explores speakers' intentions, and the structural and pragmatic resources they employ, in spoken Arabic – which is different in many essential respects from literary Arabic. Based on new empirical findings from across the Arabic world this book elucidates the many ways in which context and the goals and intentions of the speaker inform and constrain linguistic structure in spoken Arabic.

This is the first book to provide an in-depth analysis of information structure in spoken Arabic, which is based on language as it is actually used, not on normatively-given grammar. Written by leading experts in Arabic linguistics, the studies evaluate the ways in which relevant parts of a message in spoken Arabic are encoded, highlighted or obscured. It covers a broad range of issues from across the Arabic-speaking world, including the discourse-sensitive properties of word order variation, the use of intonation for information focussing, the differential role of native Arabic and second languages to encode information in a codeswitching context, and the need for cultural contextualization to understand the role of "disinformation" structure.

The studies combine a strong empirical basis with methodological and theoretical issues drawn from a number of different perspectives including pragmatic theory, language contact, instrumental prosodic analysis and (de-)grammaticalization theory. The introductory chapter embeds the project within the deeper Arabic grammatical tradition, as elaborated by the eleventh century grammarian Abdul Qahir al-Jurjani. This book provides an invaluable comprehensive introduction to an important, yet understudied, component of spoken Arabic.

1
EXPLAINING Ø AND OVERT SUBJECTS IN SPOKEN ARABIC

Jonathan Owens, William Young, Trent Rockwood, David Mehall, and Robin Dodsworth

1 Introduction

Cross-sentence subject identity in many languages (Li and Thompson 1976) is the most important element holding discourse together. Some languages even mark referential (dis)continuity morphologically, denoting whether the subject reference is the same as or different from the previous (see 3.2.2 on p. 24). However, all languages have characteristic strategies for identifying and tracking subject reference across sentence boundaries, including languages with variable null subjects, also known as “pro-drop” languages.¹ Arabic falls into this category. Like many languages, Arabic does not have highly specialized morphological or syntactic mechanisms for tracking subject reference. Therefore, the referential conditions associated with overt vs. null (Ø) subjects fall in broad measure into the realm of pragmatics.

In this chapter we adopt a twofold pragmatic approach to explaining why Arabic verbs sometimes have, and sometimes do not have, overt subjects. On the one hand, we undertake a broad statistical analysis of a corpus of three varieties of spoken Arabic. On the other, we identify within the corpus sub-patterns based on the discourse functions of subjects. Our treatment is embedded in the larger context of Arabic grammar, variation theory, information structure, and discourse analysis.²

The chapter is broadly divided into two thematic parts. The first five sections summarize the general linguistic and Arabic-specific background, while the last three offer an analytical summary, beginning with a quantitative treatment of the data.

As far as the individual sections go, Section 2 gives basic verb paradigms and Section 3 summarizes corpus-based approaches to the study of subjects, both in Arabic and in general linguistics. Section 4 identifies the grammatical contexts included in the study and describes how the data was coded, while Section 5 describes the analytic unit “episode” used in the analysis. Section 6 presents the Goldvarb analysis, which serves as the basic analytic tool for the corpus description. In Section 7 the major issue, the factors influencing the choice of Ø vs. overt subjects is explored in greater detail and on the basis of detailed textual analyses given a more precise characterization. Finally, in Section 8, the key factors identified in controlling the use of Ø/overt subject are summarized.

2 Basic paradigms

In Arabic a verb alone is sufficient to make a complete sentence, as in sirt “I went” or isiir “he goes.” An overt subject is also possible. Here verbal predicates can be divided into two classes, as seen in the examples from an Emirati imperfect verb paradigm in (1–5).

Null subject

(1)	1	a-siir
	2M	t-siir
	2F	t-siir-iin
	2PL	t-siir-uun

Overt pronoun+verb

(2)	1	ana a-siir
	2M	inte t-siir
	2F	inti t-siir-iin
	2PL	intu t-siir-uun

Third-person forms have these two possibilities

(3)	3M	i-siir
	3F	t-siir
	3PL	i-siir-uun
(4)	3M	hu i-siir
	3F	hi t-siir
	3PL	hum i-siir-uun

Additionally, third-person forms can take overt nominal subjects

(5)	3M	il-rayyaal i-siir
		“the man goes”
	3PL	il-rayaayiil i-siir-uun
		“the men go”

There are few strict syntactic rules, even when looking at very specific grammatical contexts, governing the realization of overt subjects. In this respect Arabic differs from Yiddish (Prince 1999:83–9), where Ø subjects are possible only in certain contexts (e.g. main clauses only, declaratives only).

3 Subjects and information processing

3.1 In Arabic

Despite the treatment of the subject in the classical tradition, described in the introduction to this volume, studies on informational properties of subjects in Arabic are few and far between, and most published work deals with written rather than spoken Arabic.

Among studies of written Arabic, Khalil (2000), a study of newspaper Arabic and English, is worth mentioning. He points to a strong tendency for certain discourse particles

to mark change of subject referent. As will be seen below, the criterion of same subject/different subject, though not instantiated in our texts in the same manner, is an important organizing principle in them.

Turning to studies on spoken Arabic, Brustad (2000) looks at SV vs. VS in a corpus of unspecified length. An initial problem with her approach, which makes comparison with the current corpus impossible, is the assumption that VS and V alone are both instances of VS order (2000:318). While we can imagine a number of criteria which might be developed testing such a hypothetical equivalence (e.g. occurrence and position of adverbs in VS and V sentences, length of...

Table of contents

• ROUTLEDGE ARABIC LINGUISTICS SERIES
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 EXPLAINING Ø AND OVERT SUBJECTS IN SPOKEN ARABIC
• 2 WORD ORDER AND TEXTUAL FUNCTION IN GULF ARABIC
• 3 INFORMATION STRUCTURE IN THE NAJDI DIALECTS
• 4 WORD ORDER IN EGYPTIAN ARABIC
• 5 THE INFORMATION STRUCTURE OF EXISTENTIAL SENTENCES IN EGYPTIAN ARABIC
• 6 THE PRAGMATICS OF INFORMATION STRUCTURE IN ARABIC
• 7 FROM COMPLEMENTIZER TO DISCOURSE MARKER
• 8 THE (ABSENCE OF) PROSODIC REFLEXES OF GIVEN/NEW INFORMATION STATUS IN EGYPTIAN ARABIC
• 9 MOROCCAN ARABIC-FRENCH CODESWITCHING AND INFORMATION STRUCTURE
• 10 CONVERSATION MARKERS IN ARABIC-HAUSA CODESWITCHING
• 11 UNDERSTATEMENT, EUPHEMISM, AND CIRCUMLOCUTION IN EGYPTIAN ARABIC
• INDEX