Discourse Marking and Gender Correlation in the Jebli Speech Community

Abstract

Discourse markers (henceforth DMs) in Spoken Arabic were researched quite extensively over the last decade (Ahmed, 2014; Al-Batal, 1994; Alrajhi, 2019; Bidaoui, 2015; Gaddafi, 1990; Laaboudi, 2021, etc.). The focus in most of these studies ranges from the functions of discourse markers to indexation of social meaning (Bidaoui, 2015; Laaboudi, 2021). Thus, focus was on the discourse markers in use in Bni Zeroual Arabic (BZA) and their correlation with gender, an understudied area in Arabic linguistics in that the studies that have investigated the correlation of DMs with gender in the Arab world are scarce, and those that refer to gender mostly compare the frequency of their use among men and women (Ahmed, 2014). This study investigates DMs and gender and explores how this social determinant impacts the choices of discourse markers used in natural conversations. The main thrust of this paper is that DMs index the social type, personae and stance of the speaker. Accordingly, the goal of the paper is three-fold: (i) identify the discourse markers in use in the speech community; (ii) investigate their correlation with gender; (iii) highlight how discourse markers function as “loci of indexically linked social meaning” (Campbell-Kibler, 2010).