The Textual Functions of Discourse Marker yalla in Jordanian Arabic

Murad Al Kayed, Mohammad Al-Ajalein, Sami Khalaf Al Khawaldah and Majd Alkayid

World Journal of English Language, 2023, vol. 13, issue 2, 33

Abstract: The present study aims at proving that yalla ‘hurry’ is a discourse marker in Jordanian Spoken Arabic (henceforth, JSA). It also investigates the textual functions of yalla in different contexts. The data consisted of 104 scenarios, including the JSA yalla. The researchers relied mainly on observation to collect the data needed for the present study. A panel of four raters, who were four professors of linguistics, tested the validity of the data. Moreover, a group of 50 students studying English at Al Balqa Applied University tested the data based on acceptability judgment. The findings showed that yalla is a discourse marker as it holds the common features of DMs, such as connectivity, optionality, non-truth-conditionality, weak clause association, orality, initiality, multi-categoriality, and multifunctionality. In addition, the findings revealed that the DM yalla serves five main discourse functions, namely- indicating the end of a conversation, signaling a topic shift, initiating a topic, taking a turn, and yielding a turn.

Date: 2023
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.sciedupress.com/journal/index.php/wjel/article/download/23138/14408 (application/pdf)
https://www.sciedupress.com/journal/index.php/wjel/article/view/23138 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jfr:wjel11:v:13:y:2023:i:2:p:33

Access Statistics for this article

World Journal of English Language is currently edited by Joe Nelson

More articles in World Journal of English Language from Sciedu Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sciedu Press ().