Intonational Meanings of Discourse Markers in Spoken Colloquial Arabic

Abstract

Intonation is the rise and fall of the voice while speaking. It expresses the attitudes and emotions and have a grammatical, discourse, linguistic, psychological and indexical functions. It makes significant and systematic contributions to utterance interpretation. This study sought to investigate  the types of meanings and pragmatic functions that the discourse markers (طيب /Tayyib/ O.K, خلاص /xala:S/ (that’s it), إن شاء الله InshaAllah (God willing), ما قَصَّرْت /ma gaSSart/ & ما قَصَّرتِي /ma gaSSarti/ (much appreciated), لا لا /la: la:/ (no…no),  يا ستي /ya sitti/ (ma’am), يا سلام /ya sala:m/ (wow), يا عيني /ya ؟eyni/, يا مسهل /ya: msahhil/ (asking God for making things easy), and يا ساتر /ya sa:ter/ (Oh My God) have when each is uttered with different intonation patterns in spoken Colloquial Arabic. Twenty student-translators received training in uttering the discourse markers with different intonations, identifying the meaning and/or purpose conveyed by each intonation, then they performed an elicitation and a judgment/interpretation task in which they were required to pronounce each discourse marker out loud with as variety of intonations and identify the meaning conveyed by each. Data analysis showed that each discourse marker has a variety of meanings and pragmatic functions when uttered with different intonations. The context makes it clear which meaning each intonation implies. Results of the interpretation of meanings that each discourse marker in the sample are reported in detail.