Discourse-pragmatic functions of wellah and wellahi in spoken Kurdish

Abstract

This study explores the discourse-pragmatic functions of the lexical items wellah and wellahi by twenty-four Iraqi Kurdish-speaking adults (24 first and fourth-year undergraduate students). All the participants studied in the English department at the University of Raparin in Kurdistan. As a qualitative research, Brinton’s (1996) binary classification is adopted as a theoretical framework in defining the functions wellah and wellahi have at the textual and interpersonal levels. Using empirical data, five individual functions related to the use of wellah and wellahi: including three textual functions (elaboration, filler and; topic shift) and two interpersonal ones (response marker [politeness marker] and confirmation marker) are demonstrated. Throughout, the findings link to those identified in previous Arabic studies. The data analysis demonstrates that the use of wellahi in Kurdish is similar to its use in Arabic. In addition, the current study indicates that both wellah and wellahi function as discourse markers interchangeably in most of the cases. The results suggest that principles of grammaticalisation, such as phonetic-reduction and layering, could explain the development of interchangeability of the discourse markers. This study contributes to our understanding of the pragmatics of Kurdish language, the functions of discourse markers, language variation and grammaticalisation