Discourse markers of elaboration in Maghrebi and Egyptian dialects: a socio-pragmatic perspective

Abstract

Discourse Markers (DMs) have traditionally been viewed as elements which do not contribute to the truthconditional meaning of an utterance or to its syntactic and semantic make-up. Contrary to those linguists who found the study of DMs marginal, other researchers have been interested in the study of these expressions. Using a Relevance Theoretic framework (Sperber and Wilson, 1986, 1995; Blakemore, 1987), this paper posits that DMs signal pragmatic inferences that are performed by the addressee. Specifically, I argue that the notion of procedural meaning, a set of instructions which guides the inferential phase of utterance interpretation, offered by Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995; Blakemore, 2002) should be at the core of the interpretation of DMs. This paper is based on data collected during face-to-face interactions. The participants in the main study are members of an Arabic diasporic community in the U.S. and represent three dialects of Arabic: Moroccan, Algerian, and Egyptian dialect.
The results show how the meaning of elaboration as a pragmatic variable (Schneider and Barron, 2008; Terkourafi, 2011) is realized by means of different pragmatic variants. The realization of elaboration DMs is shaped by nationality, type of interaction, and individual choices. At the theoretical level, the findings highlight the need to study variation not only in terms of the correlation of the linguistic behavior with broad social categories but also in light of socio-psychological choices made by the individual (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller, 1985).