This paper uses a relevance-theoretic approach (Blakemore 87, 2002; Blass 1990; Sperber and Wilson 1995) to propose a procedural account of the Tunisian Arabic discourse marker (DM) Ɂama. The distribution of Ɂama in a corpus of naturally occurring discourse indicates that it signals four different meanings: ‘contrast’, ‘cancellation’, ‘correction’, and ‘denial of an assumed implication’. I propose a unified account by proposing that Ɂama encodes one general procedure, which guides the hearer to see an ‘INCOMPATIBILITY’ between two properties or two propositions as shown in (1-4).

 

(1) illi     ji-ksib      l-maʕrfa             j-sallik-ha 

     REL 3M-earn the-knowledge3M-make-it

 

    Ɂama   illi        ma      ju-sil-ʃ                 li-l-maʕrifa               saʕd-u       makbū 

    Ɂama  REL    NEG   3M-arrive-NEG   to-the-knowledge    luck-his upside.down    

 

    ‘Those who gain knowledge will make it; Ɂama  those who do not

      are down on their luck.’

 

(2) ih    tfarhidt,           Ɂama   inti     win       bajit               l-bariħ 

       yes refl-had.fun  Ɂamayou wheresleep.the-last night

       ‘Yes, I had fun, where did you spend the night yesterday?’

 

(3) manīʃ   ndāfiʕ     ʕla   n-nahða       Ɂama   na-ʕti     fi   wiʒhat       naðar-i 

       1-defend  on   the-nahdha   Ɂama   1-give     in   direction  view-mine 

       ‘I am not defending [the political party] Ennahdha; Ɂama  I am giving my point of view’.

 

(4) selim   rjāħi   beʃ      jfuz fi     l-Ɂintixabāt   

     Selim Riahi win        in          the-elections

 

      na-ʕrif   ʕlāʃ   Ɂama  man-qūl-ʃ

      1- know why Ɂama      1-tell- NEG

      Selim Riahi will win the elections. I know why Ɂama will not say’.

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In (1), Ɂama indicates that those who gain knowledge and those who do not are incompatible with respect to the level of success they achieve in life. In (2), the DM Ɂama indicates that the proposition communicated by its second conjunct is more important than the one communicated by the first one; and that it has to cancel and replace it. In (3), Ɂama indicts that the Ɂama-introduced conjunct is a correction to the proposition communicated by the previous one. In (4), Ɂama indicates that its second conjunct is relevant as a denial of an expected implication (i.e., the speaker may share what she knows) derived from the first one. Hearers achieve these meanings by combining linguistic content from the utterance with accessible contextual assumptions. Further, the data analysis reveals that the role of Ɂama is not to contribute to the truth conditions of the utterance that contains it, but to serve as an explicit linguistic marker that guides  the hearer to achieve relevance.

 

References (mentioned in the abstract)

 

Blakemore, Diane. 1987. Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Oxford, UK/NewYork, USA: Blackwell.

_________2002. Relevance and Linguistic Meaning: The semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse Markers. New York: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Blass, Regina. 1990.  Relevance Relations in Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication & cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.