Discourse markers within sentence grammar: Further evidence from ʕaad in Jordanian Arabic

Abstract

This article investigates the discourse functions of ʕaad in Jordanian Arabic (JA), based on a naturally occurring corpus which consists of 20 sociolinguistic interviews with 60 participants. Upon analysing all occurrences of ʕaad in the corpus, we propose that ʕaad is a discourse marker that provides supplementary information that relates the speaker's attitude (i.e., disagreement) to the proposition expressed by the host sentence. Additionally, this article offers a syntactic account of this discourse marker arguing that its distribution (and interpolation) can be syntactically captured. The syntactic analysis is based on the notion of grounding (Wiltschko and Heim, 2016; Thoma, 2016; Wiltschko, 2017a, 2017b). We essentially argue that the marker ʕaad heads the so-called Speaker-oriented Ground Phrase, following its main function in expressing the commitment that the speaker displays towards the proposition rather than asking the addressee for a request of how to respond to the utterance. In so doing, this article adds credence to proposals under which discourse markers can be incorporated within sentence grammar with no need for an extra level of grammar representation (see Potts, 2005; de Vries, 2012; Wiltschko and Heim, 2016).