Abstract
AbstractThis study shows that the discourse particle tara in Jordanian Arabic identifies whether its utterance presents new or given information. In other words, there exists a relation between the presence of this particle (i.e. its position) and the type of information packaging of its utterance. When tara appears utterance‐initially, the accompanying utterance is presented as being in sentence focus (i.e. as all‐new). By contrast, when tara appears utterance‐finally, the accompanying utterance is presented as all‐given, and the hearer in such cases is instructed to pay attention to the content of the utterance which he/she should be previously aware of, from the speaker’s perspective. Additionally, this paper shows that tara can be used as a topic marker when it appears utterance‐internally. In such cases, tara is preceded by the element(s) expressing Referential Topic(s) (RTop) which convey the shared and anaphoric information with respect to the interlocutors’ mental state and previous discourse.
Published Version
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