On the Grammaticalization of Iterative Aspectual Markers in Rural Jordanian Arabic

Abstract

This article explores the grammatical functions of iterative aspectual markers in Jordanian Arabic from a synchronic perspective. It will be argued that the aspectual markers in question are functional elements that have been grammaticalized from lexical items belonging to the verbal category. It will be shown that, as a consequence of grammaticalization, reduplication of verbs whose second and third radicals are identical has led to the development of an iterative aspectual marker, and that another marker with the same function has emerged from the active participle naazil ‘descending/going down’ which is a derivative of the verb nizel ‘descended/went down’. Special attention will be paid to the linguistic features of the aspectual markers at hand, including their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties.

Keywords:

• Rural Jordanian Arabic
• iterative aspectual markers
• grammaticalization
• syntax
• pragmatics

Acknowledgements

I would like to deeply thank the reviewers for their valuable comments that helped improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The glossing conventions adopted in this paper are as follows: acc = accusative, act = actual, aux = auxiliary, f = feminine, 1p = first person, intens = intensification, iter.asp = iterative aspect, m = masculine, mid = middle voice, neg.pot = negative potential, nom = nominative, past = past tense, pf = perfective, pl = plural, prs = present tense, prog.asp = progressive aspect, red = reduplication, sg = singular, 3p = third person.

2 The transliteration system adopted here follows the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), including the author's examples as well as those taken from other sources.

3 It is also worth mentioning that the actions denoted by the transitive verbs in (9a–c) may be performed on one object or many, as is the case with geminated verbs in Standard Arabic provided in (3) above (Fassi Fehri 2003).

4 To be precise, Cinque’s (1999) hierarchy of functional projections includes Asp_repetitive Phrase and Asp_{frequentative} Phrase which may synonymously be used to refer to iterative aspect. To avoid any ambiguities, however, I am sticking to Asp_iterative Phrase in the current study.

5 It must be noted here that Cinque (1999) has not addressed reduplication or movement in his hierarchy of functional projections; nor has he discussed the categorical selection requirements of functional heads. Rather, he was mainly concerned with the syntactic location of functional projections across natural languages, which the current analysis adopts along with other minimalist assumptions such as head movement/adjunction and categorical selection (e.g., see Rizzi and Roberts 1989; Chomsky 1995).

6 Observe that the verb descend or go down, according to Heine and Kuteva (2002) and Kuteva et al. (2019), has cross-linguistically undergone a shift to adverbial or directional markers/prepositions (I will return to point later). This linguistic phenomenon, however, has not been documented in the context of Arabic, to the best of my knowledge, nor have there been any previous studies on any grammaticalization process of the active participle naazil ‘descending/going down’. But as we will see in this (sub)section, naazil ‘descending/going down’ in JA, unlike in other languages, has undergone a change to an iterative aspectual marker, which also sets it apart from other Arabic dialects.

7 A question raised by a reviewer is whether the past tense auxiliary, like the one we see in (28), can co-occur with the reduplication. First of all, the past tense auxiliary kaan in (28) grammatically encodes a progressive aspectual meaning, as is the case with its English counterpart. This auxiliary can indeed precede the reduplicated verb, in which case it functions as a progressive aspectual marker, as in (i) below.

Table

8 As far as agreement in (28) is concerned, a point raised by a reviewer, the auxiliary and the main verb agree with the subject in person, gender, and number. The aspectual marker naazil, on the other hand, agrees with the subject only in gender and number; this is so because it is morphologically an active participle form, and all participles in Arabic solely exhibit gender and number agreement.