Numbers as evaluative devices: An exploratory study of semantic prosody in Kuwaiti spoken Arabic

Abstract

This article explores the semantic prosody of numerical expressions in an under-researched context, Kuwaiti Spoken Arabic (KA). A corpus of 547 elicited utterances was compiled through the Mentimeter online platform. Participants were asked to write sentences in which they use numbers as they would in their daily lives. After formalising the spelling variation in the data following Nofal (2023), the data were analysed qualitatively, based on the frameworks of semantic prosody and semantic preference. The data were coded independently by both authors and then discussed together for divergent cases to arrive at a final classification. The three numerals that were most frequently used for evaluation were identified through frequency analysis: ألف/1000 (thousand), مية/100 (hundred), and مليون/1000000 (million). The construction [numeral + مرة] became the most frequent means of negative prosody, appearing with each of the three main numerals in about 63-66% of the utterances in which they occurred. The prosodic polarity analysis shows a consistent pattern: ألف has the widest pragmatic range, with a negative profile in the context of complaint and repeated instruction, and a fairly strong positive profile in conventionalised felicitation formulae; مليون and مية have predominantly neutral-to-negative profiles, with positive uses mostly restricted to greeting and affection expressions. The study shows that large round numbers in KA are evaluative intensifiers and not exact quantifiers, and that the prosodic direction is determined by the collocational environment rather than the numeral itself.