Thetical markers within sentence grammar: Evidence from the Arabic thetical marker ʕad
Mustafa Harb, Marwan Jarrah
October 2020 

Thetical markers (i.e., expressions with metatextual/metacommunicative functions that relate to the situation in which the host utterance takes place) are normally viewed as ‘non-syntactic phenomena that pose a problem for syntactic analysis (Burton-Roberts 2005)’ (Kaltenböck et al. 2011: 853). Such markers are supposed not to be restricted to the syntax of the host utterance. In this paper, we bring novel evidence that challenges this view as well as the need for the so-called Thetical Grammar that makes available an independent domain for discourse processing. We, rather, argue that thetical markers can be accounted for using Sentence Grammar that includes no further level of grammatical representation. Our main evidence comes from the marker ʕaad in Jordanian Arabic which is shown to be a thetical marker whose function is to provide supplementary information that also describes the speaker’s attitude. We propose that the variant position of ʕaad in its host sentence is a direct result of the movement (or base-generation) of some parts of the utterance to the Specifier position of the projection headed by ʕaad. In so doing, this paper adds credence to proposals where thetical markers are incorporated within sentence grammar (Potts 2005; de Vries 2012; Wiltschko & Heim 2016).

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005236 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Under Review
keywords:	arabic; cooptation; sentence grammar, thetical markers; thetical marker ʕad, syntax
previous versions:	v2 [June 2020] v1 [June 2020]
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