Documentation of Discourse-related Particles in North Hail Arabic

Abstract

The current research investigates a range of discourse particles used in North Hail Arabic, a variety spoken in Saudi Arabia. It delves into their pragmatic functions related to discourse. Investigating 17 discourse particles, the current research argues that they are associated with specific discourse/pragmatics functions: speaker-positive, speaker-negative, evidentiality, and discourse coherence. Additionally, the current research introduces a general syntactic analysis for these particles, assuming that they are heads, associated with discourse features, have their own functional projections and are base-generated in the left periphery. It shows that these particles are different in terms of whether they are able to be resumed by a pronominal clitic or not. For this, the study attributes this behaviour to whether the given particle has a set of Φ-features (phi-features) or not. All in all, the current research is meant to bring these particles to the fore, suggesting them as a rich area for different linguistic domains (i.e., syntax, semantics, pragmatics, etc.).