Subject expression and discourse embeddedness in Emirati Arabic

Abstract

Since Prince (1981) and Givón (1983), studies on discourse reference have explained the grammatical realization of referents in terms of general concepts such as “assumed familiarity” or “discourse coherence.” In this paper, we develop a complementary approach based on a detailed statistical tracking of subjects in Emirati Arabic, from which two major categories of subject expression emerge. On the one hand, null subjects are opposed to overt ones; on the other, subject-verb (SV) is opposed to verb-subject (VS). Although null subjects strongly correlate with coreferentiality with the subject of the previous clause, they can also index more distant referents within a single episode. With respect to SV vs. VS, morpholexical classes are found to be biased toward one or the other: nouns are typically VS, pronouns SV. We conclude that the null subject variant is the norm in Emirati Arabic, and when an overt subject is appropriate, lexical identity biases the subject into SV or VS order, generating word order as a discourse-relevant parameter. Overall, our approach attempts to understand Arabic discourse from a microlevel perspective.

Beyond categorical typology: statistically-graded finiteness in Glavda

“…To the extent that the statistical correlations reveal underlying causal connections therefore, they operate within the lexeme. This observation dovetails in a general way with related ones by Erker and Guy (2012: 552) and Owens et al (2013) who argue for the existence of rich lexical representations which go beyond a basic grammatical lexical frame 8 to include, inter alia, frequency information associated with individual lexemes which is instrumentalized in various ways in connected discourse. In this paper, a high frequency of occurrence of morpheme X with morpheme Y is argued to attract any other morphemes which occur with X to Y.…”

Two languages, one effect: Structural priming in spontaneous code-switching

“…Each of these has been replicated in quantitative studies of variation between expressed and unexpressed subject pronouns in languages other than Spanish, subject continuity for languages as diverse as Cantonese, Italian, Russian (Nagy, Aghdasi, Denis & Motut, 2011, pp. 141–142) and Arabic (Owens, Dodsworth & Kohn, 2013, p. 268; Parkinson, 1987, p. 354); both subject continuity and priming for Auslan (McKee, Schembri, McKee & Johnston, 2011, pp. 387–389) and the Vanuatuan language Tamambo (Meyerhoff, 2009, pp.…”

The morphologization of an Arabic creole

“…In my alternative explanation (discussed in 3.1.2.3) the final -u is a plural subject marker, and as noted above (compare (52a) with (52c)), this suffix automatically becomes stressed whenever an object suffix is added after it. Secondly, Arabic so consistently uses a 3mpl form ending in -u as a passive, that in a study of Emirati Arabic which is introduced for comparative purposes in 4.1 below, we recognized a special category of 'plural passive' (termed 'new referent' in Table 3 below) among our null subject types (see Table 3, Owens et al 2013). (63) is an example.…”

“…In this case I look at a relevantly tagged corpus-based study of an Arabic dialect, namely Emirati Arabic (Owens et al 2009, Owens et al 2010, Owens et al 2013). 48 The following Table 3 shows how many subjects are overtly expressed, 47.…”