The Semantic and Pragmatic Functions of /bʕdɪn/ “بعدين” in Informal Arabic

Abstract

This study aims at investigating the functions of the informal Arabic discourse marker “بعدين” /bʕdɪn/. By figuring out these functions and highlighting the common used ones, this paper tries to help communicators to be aware of those functions in their communication and avoid any possibility of misunderstanding. “Twitter” was the main tool of collecting the data of this study. This social medium provided natural communication contexts that significantly assisted the analysis of this study. The dataset consisted of one hundred and five tweets containing /bʕdɪn/. Those tweets reflected texts written by native Arabic speakers from different nationalities. The analysis was guided by the relevance theory and the methodology of related literature. The findings of the study showed that /bʕdɪn/ has semantic meanings similar to the English adverbs “then” and “later.” It was used semantically as a temporal adverb putting actions in sequence or delaying a move to unspecified time in the future. /bʕdɪn/ was also used as a coherence marker supporting the value of the communicative situations. In this respect and based on the collected data, seven pragmatic functions were elicited in this study for /bʕdɪn/. Those functions were: a marker of orientation shift, a marker of result, a conditional marker, a marker of disagreement, a coordination marker meaning “but,” a marker of agreement and a marker of reason.