Grammatical Encoding of Discourse Structure

A Case Study of The Arabic Discourse Particle Tara

Datos Bibliográficos

ID21418779
AutoresMarwan Jarrah (0000-0003-1528-7326, University of Jordan, autor de correspondencia), Mustafa Harb (0000-0002-0632-5071, Ball State University)
Año2021
Volumen119
Número1
Páginas83-104
Fecha de publicación2021-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaTransactions of the Philological Society (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0079-1636 • E-ISSN: 1467-968X
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1467-968x.12208
OpenAlexW3152877694
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas3
Referencias citadas29

This 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

Arabic · Focus (optics) · Linguistics · Perspective (graphical) · Physics · Sentence · Utterance · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Philosophy · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation