The Pragmatic Functions of the Discourse Marker Bas in Jordanian Spoken Arabic: Evidence from a Corpus

Abstract

This study investigates the pragmatic functions of the discourse marker bas (Lit. But) in Jordanian Spoken Arabic. To this end, a corpus of 24 dyadic conversations, consisting of 93313 words were obtained from natural conversations of native speakers of Jordanian Arabic (males and females). 1113 instances of bas were identified in the data. This study is based on Fraser’s (2006) grammatical-pragmatic framework. Qualitative methods were employed to answer the question of the study. The analysis was based on the pragmatic functions introduced by Brinton (1996) and Fraser (2006). The data analysis reveals that the DM bas serves the following pragmatic functions in JSA: initiating a topic, signaling topic change, closing a turn, ending a conversation, indicating speaker’s hesitancy, mitigating Face Threatening Acts, making a correction, attracting hearer’s attention, expressing restrictions and conditions, showing disbelief and indicating a question, providing interpretation, showing contrast, expressing regret , showing agreement, indicating emphasis, and finally filling in gaps in an interaction. Finally, this study suggests that DMs in Arabic play a vital role in people’s daily communication; therefore, they should not be neglected by linguists.