Subordinate clauses of time and condition in Bedouin dialects

Abstract

A number of recent studies have examined conditional clauses in Classical Arabic. However, to date I have not seen anything devoted to the study of these structures in a colloquial dialect, although most teaching manuals devote a section to this. The following is an attempt to describe conditional clauses and the related time-clause structures in certain Bedouin dialects. My interest in them originated in the difficulty I myself found in mastering this area of syntax, and from a perception of them as being more complex than such structures in English. A further point of interest which led me to investigate this area was the multiplicity of conditional and time particles including in, lo and āān signifying ‘if’, lamman and yōm signifying ‘when’ and ila signifying ‘if’ or ‘when’. I was interested to find out what factors, if any, conditioned the choice of these particles. The reason for broadening the study to take in time clauses also, is that in this dialect, in one area of conditional sentences, the two types: conditional and time clause, come very close together and are in some cases indistinguishable, or to put it another way, one would not know whether to translate the sentence into English with ‘if’ or ‘when’. The two types of sentence also share various characteristics which will be pointed out below, but in particular, many of them show a marker on both the main and subordinate clause.