yaʕni: what it (really) means

yaʕni: what it (really) means

Jonathan Owens, trent rockwoodUniversity of maryland

1. General background there is an overall consensus that discourse markers (Dm) reveal speaker’s intentions, attitudes, their state of knowledge and plans for text organization relative to elements of discourse. Beyond this, they have been approached in two opposed ways, with a number of interme-diary positions and ancillary positions. On the one hand, Fraser (1990) argues that discourse markers have a pragmatic meaning linked to a speaker’s communicative intentions, but not a semantic meaning. he adduces a number of examples (1990: 393) in which he suggests, for instance, that “so” has a meaning es-sentially determined by context. in (1a) it is “as a logical conclusion” whereas in (1b) it means “i conclude”, and so on1. example:

1 a. susan is married. so she is no longer single.

b. attorney: and how long were you a part of the clean up crew? witness: five years attorney: so you were employed for roughly five years.

an opposing position has been to identify a basic or core meaning, and to account for the many variants in terms of contextual determi-

1though in more recent work (e.g. 1998), Fraser has adopted the view that discourse markers have a core, procedural meaning. his earlier position is worth mentioning as one possible interpretation of Dms.

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nants. this may be seen to follow in broad measure, Grice’s dictum, “senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity” (Grice 1989: 47). Fox-tree and schrock (2002: 737) are a good example of this. they argue that ya know, for instance,

2. and i was the only person there that was sort of remotely you know competent to speak

has the very general meaning of filling out unspoken intentions by invit-ing the addressee to make the relevant attendant inferences. they note that ya know will correlate with characteristic features at the interper-sonal, turn management, and back channeling levels. On any occasion ya know may mark topic shifts, emphasis and focusing, or introduction of given information, but the authors consider these functions derivable from the inferential force of ya know, rather than being a part of its meaning. an intermediate position of sorts is schiffrin’s (1987), who while recognizing the possibility of a core meaning for discourse markers, embeds them in a general framework of five functions into which Dm’s can or cannot be slotted. these are termed the ideational structure, ex-change structure, action structure, participation framework and the in-formation state. in her approach, while a Dm may have a core meaning, it need not, because if it does not, its function is still explicable as a discourse marker in terms of the scaffolding provided by the five func-tions which each Dm fulfills. the Dm oh, for instance, signals a change of information state and in terms of participation framework it marks certain types of actions (speech acts), such as clarification . however, it has no ideational or exchange structure function. it is not ideational, for instance, because it does not enter into referential relations (see redeker 1991: 1154 for criticisms). these different definitional stances lead to a divergent recognition of the Dm inventory so that there is not total consensus about what con-stitutes their total class. For Fraser (1990: 392) oh! is not one because it does not meet his criterion of signaling a sequential relationship, while for schiffrin (1987), redeker (1991), and heritage (2005), it is. For schiffrin (1987: 31), discourse markers bracket units of talk, which qualifies (sentence initial) oh, while for redeker (1991: 1168) her “dis-course operators” signal a link between an upcoming utterance and the

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immediate discourse context, a characterization which again qualifies oh as a Dm. Discourse markers have further been analyzed in terms of conversa-tional pragmatics, due in large part to Grice’s characterization of certain Dm’s in terms of conversational implicatures. we will consider this perspective in greater detail in section 4. First, in sections 2 and 3 we will concentrate on the question of in what sense one arabic discourse marker can be said to have a meaning.

2. arabic the detailed study of discourse markers in spoken arabic is largely in its infancy. For this reason we will concentrate on one discourse marker, basing the study on a fixed corpus and approaching it from dif-ferent analytic angles. the Dm we have chosen to look at in detail is yaʕni, a particle of high frequency in our texts. the use of a fairly large corpus allows us not only to consider a large range of contextualized meanings, but also to make statements of some generality in regards to conversation analytic, genre and collocational issues. as far as research on Dms in arabic goes, al-Batal (1994) studies what he terms ‘connectives’ in a corpus of lebanese arabic these are considered in terms of sharedness with msa, and in terms of a (now somewhat outmoded) “levels” approach to the classification of ara-bic texts in the tradition of Blanc (1960) and Badawi (1973).2 yaʕni is among the connectives considered by al-Batal to be lebanese, not an msa borrowing (which we would agree with). as in our data (see 3.1 below), it is noted that yaʕni serves as a connective at all grammatical levels. Beyond this, there are, of course, characterizations of discourse markers in many dialect grammars. however, a perusal of these, con-centrating on the marker yaʕni indicates a considerable degree of varia-tion.

2this classifies texts globally on a scale of most dialect-like to most msa-like. there are two basic problems with this approach. First, it does not adequately dis-entangle the individual linguistic features, phonological, morphological and lexical, which together globally allow the characterization of a text as one variety or an-other. secondly, and related to this point, it bypasses the by now highly developed quantitative sociolinguistic tradition which allows a more subtle characterization of texts or aspects thereof.


in a selection of dictionaries and grammars four different glosses turn up frequently:

1. particle signaling the giving or requesting of clarification = that’s to say, that is, does that mean then (in a question), (hinds and Badawi 1986: 606).

this gloss is found with minor additions or exclusions for:iraqi arabic (Clarity et al. 2003: 326), who also have “in fact”;yemeni and Gulf arabic: (Qafisheh, 2000: 436, and 1997: 447) “that is”, “in other words”, as well as holes (2001 on Gulf arabic), “that is, in other words”algerian: (Bergman 2005: 399-400) “i mean, that is to say”soukhne (ne syria, Behnstedt 1994: 326): “that is to say” (German “das heisst”)Khaweetna (nw iraq, ne syria, talay 2003: 360): “that is to say” (“das heisst”)libyan: (Dickinson 2004: 389 ) “that is”moroccan: (harrel 2006 (1966): 204, 260): “that is, in other words”

2. attempted clarification, when the speaker is groping for words = y’know (hinds and Badawi 1986, bass yaʕni kunt ʕaawiz asʔalak suʔaal). Dick-inson also suggests “ya know”, and adds that it may be a neutral place holder

3. Parenthetical remark, approximately, “then, therefore” (Qafisheh 1997 and 2000). an identical gloss is found for iraqi (Clarity et al.), and the Gulf (holes)

4. a noncommittal response with implied reservation = so-so, sort of (hinds and Badawi), also found for Gulf arabic (holes), iraqi (wood-head and Been).3

3this usage (e.g. raħ timṭur? yaʕni “is it going to rain? maybe”) does not occur in our corpus, which is characterized by narrative and in part, argumentative texts. there are relatively few question-answer pairs. it is our impression that this particu-lar usage has an egyptian ring to it, though this requires verification. it fits with our basic characterization of yaʕni (see 3.4) in that it neither contradicts nor affirms the proposition contained in the question. as it were, it answers a question by another question, “your guess is as good as mine”, meeting like with like.


in addition for egyptian arabic, woidich (2006: 363) lists it among question particles (yaʕni dilwaʔti yibʔa naaʔiṣ ʔee “what’s still miss-ing”). One common thread running through most of these definitions is the implication that yaʕni signals a further qualification of that which has been just said (“that is, in other words, in short “). the gloss “there-fore” adds a specific cause-effect meaning, while hinds and Badawi’s “groping” adds the implication of uncertainty, presumably either be-cause of the social situation or because of lack of cognitive clarity. informally can be discerned here definitional issues surrounding yaʕni which are encountered in general in studies of discourse mark-ers. Does yaʕni have a single core meaning (e.g. “that is”), or are other meanings part of yaʕni as well (e.g. “therefore”). the gloss “groping” locates the meaning in what yaʕni does, rather than what it refers to. in this paper we would like to look at yaʕni in some depth from a corpus-based perspective. the backdrops to this study are general lin-guistic issues (most of course stemming from studies on english) which will be used to elucidate the status of yaʕni. we use a broad but eclectic mix of issues in order to draw attention to the complexity of analyses accompanying ostensibly innocuous words, like yaʕni. in section 3 we describe our corpus and present two fundamentally different interpretations of the meaning of yaʕni. we argue for a ‘mini-malist’ interpretation of yaʕni, backing up our text-based conclusions with indexical issues of different types. in section 4 we briefly consider two further analytical perspectives which might elucidate yaʕni fur-ther, while in section 5 we isolate a second general ‘focus’ meaning of yaʕni, which, we suggest, is derivative of the basic meaning. Finally, in section 6 we touch on six further perspectives of yaʕni, informed by sociolinguistics, genre considerations, and practical matters of teaching. Our overall aim is to produce a comprehensive overview of the issues impinging on an interpretation of yaʕni, but not a comprehensive treat-ment of the morpheme from a single theoretical perspective.

3. a corpus-based study in order to look at this issue in greater detail, we collected a total of 719 “yaʕni’s” in a corpus of about 27,000 words of spoken arabian


peninsular arabic, or 2.6% of all words in the corpus.4 the texts used are as follows, the number of yaʕni’s per dialect given to the right of the slash.

emirates: 14,801/423Kuwait: 5,448/145Jeddah: 7,451/150total: 27,700/719

From these 719 tokens, we selected 300 for closer classification (148 from emirati, 101 from Kuwaiti, 51 from Jeddah). these will be invoked to illustrate issues of detail. Before beginning, we should note we assume axiomatically that yaʕni is a discourse marker. as seen above, various definitions of dis-course markers have been advanced for english, and different definitions encompass different sets of markers. so far as we know, no detailed framework exists for classifying spoken arabic particles into specific classes of discourse markers, and therefore the question whether a mor-pheme is or is not a discourse marker in spoken arabic is not one which can be debated against a broad scholarly backdrop. we can, however, note that yaʕni fulfills a “classic” definition of Dm’s, namely that of connecting parts of discourse. this basic function will become more apparent as the discussion progresses. in this section we define the basic attributes of yaʕni, beginning with grammatical distribution (3.1) and moving on to its meaning(s) (3.2-3.4).

3.1 Grammatical and positional distribution Commensurate with its high overall frequency, the distribution of yaʕni is virtually unrestricted, either in grammatical terms, or relative

4it is also by far the most frequent discourse marker in the corpus. the top five in our material are: yaʕni: 719 bass: 226 fa: 192 zeen/nzeen (backchannel, conversation marker): 88 (no tokens of this in Jeddah, however) ṭayyib: 48


to its position in an utterance. to give a non-exhaustive idea of its distribution, we note that yaʕni occurs in the following grammatical contexts. in the examples “,” marks a pause, and the underlined english gloss our interpretation of yaʕni in that example.

3. V + adverbial complement gaal l-i ana raayiħ aa yaʕni nəs iṭ-ṭariig said to-1sG i going ah Dm half DeF-way “he told me, i’m going, ah just half the way” (emirates)

4. time adverbial expressions a fi s-sana sitt we θimaaniin, aaxar yaʕni, sitta wa simaaniin in DeF-year six and eighty end Dm eighty and six “in 1986, the end i mean, of 1986.” (emirates)

b. ħa t-siir yaʕni baʕad fatra FUt 3F-happen Dm after period “it will happen (yaʕni) after a while” (Jeddah)

5. two prepositional; phrases lamma kin-t maʕa ʕaaylit-i yaʕni, maʕaa-kum, a-ħiss… when was-1sG with family-1sG Dm with-2Pl 1sG-feel “when i was with my family i mean, with you, i felt…” (Kuwait)

6. Verb and object a. i-samm-uun-ah yaʕni seed trant-set 3m-call-Pl-3sG Dm lane 37 “they call it (yaʕni) road 37” (emirates)

b. xarraj-at yaʕni katiir graduated-3F Dm many “it (the school) graduated like many (students).” (Jeddah)

7. Predicate + inverted subject seera wa radd, yaʕni fi nafs iš-šaariʕ going and returning Dm in same DeF-street “Going and coming (were) on the same lane” (emirates)


8. existential verb + subject a. ma fii-hum, yaʕni mahaara neG in-3Pl Dm skill “they have no, ya know skill” (emirates)

b. ma ʕind-uhum yaʕni haaδa l… at-taʕliim neG at-3Pl Dm Dem DeF-education “they don’t have i mean that education…” (Jeddah)

9. Before predicate adjectives a. illi i-suug is-seekal guwi ma-ša-allaah, yaʕni riyaaδi that 3m-drives DeF-bicycle strong God willing Dm athletic “the one who pedaled the bicycle was strong by gosh, i mean athletic”

(emirates)

b. al-madiina fii-ha ašyaaʔ yaʕni ħilwa DeF-city in-3sG things-Pl Dm nice “the city (after all) has nice things in it” (Jeddah)

10. auxiliary kaan + main verb ana kun-t yaʕni daxal-t madaaris l-ħukuuma i was-1sG Dm entered-1sG schools-Pl DeF-government “i had (yaʕni) entered the government schools” (Jeddah)

11. Between two propositions5

a. fa hu ṭabʕan rəyyaal ṭayyib yaʕni haaδa đaabət ṭayyib and he of course man good Dm Dem officer good “so he of course was a good man, ya know this was a good officer”

(emirates)

b. kaʔannu ma ʕind-aha jnaaħ-een, yaʕni laazim ti-ntaẓir wa t-šuuf as if neG at-3F wing-DUal Dm must 3F-wait and 3F-see “… as if she doesn’t have wings, like she has to wait and see” (Jed-

dah)

5al-Batal recognizes five distinctive grammatical levels at which discourse markers occur, phrase, clause, sentence, paratone and discourse. a general problem with proceeding on the basis of a detailed hierarchical discourse structure is the need to provide clear criteria for the different levels themselves. while they might be defin-able – al-Batal does not give explicit criteria for his own – lacking detailed criteria we feel a less elaborated characterization, essentially within clause as in examples 1-10 and between propositions (11) allows a more direct descriptive account of yaʕni itself.


we would note that this last category is its most frequent position, and most of the examples in sections 3.2 and 3.3, as well as section 6, fall into this category. in the above examples, yaʕni is exemplified post pause (7, 11b), pre-pause (2a, 5, 8a, 9a), and without pause (3, 4b, 6 8b, 9b, 10, 11, see 3.4.2 for further). more than one yaʕni can occur in a sentence. in our sample, three is the most which occur (see 3.4 below for discussion).

12. yaʕni bu xaalid yaʕni mitmassik bi ṣəḷḷaat yaʕni, Dm abu xaalid Dm dedicated in prayers-Pl Dm “like abu xaalid i mean is dedicated in his prayers ya know” (emir-

ates)

3.2 meaning, function of yaʕni, part a as might be expected from a morpheme as frequent in occurrence as yaʕni, the question of what its meaning is, or indeed, if it can be said to have a meaning, is not obvious. we will approach this issue from two perspectives. in this section we look at the occurrence of yaʕni in a number of different contexts and suggest possible translations in eng-lish. this approach follows some of the lexicographical and grammati-cal sources summarized in section 2 above, in particular those relating to egyptian arabic (hinds and Badawi, woidich). the following set of glosses is non-exhaustive. wherever questions of meaning are concerned, where appropriate we gloss or summarize the textual background of our examples. in some examples more than one yaʕni occurs. in these cases italics marks the one illustrated in the gloss.

13. “Because” il-ħafla šey muhimm, yaʕni yi-rawwi haw mač il-ʕaaila DeF-party thing important Dm 3m-shows how much DeF-family

yaʕni kan spend Dm can spend

“the party is something important. Because it shows how much the family i mean can spend” (Kuwait)

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14. “Question marker” yaʕni marks a question with closed propositional content (i.e. ‘yes=no’,

not an open Q word).6

two speakers are discussing which type of work regime is the better. the speaker solicits B’s opinion, either a or B, ending his question with yaʕni.

a: fa šu ray-ək inta, tə-faḍḍəl əd-dəwaam ir-rasmi and what opinion-2m you 2m-prefer DeF-work DeF-official

wəlla dəwaam iš-šəft-aath, bi-nisba l-ɛk yaʕni or work DeF-shift-Pl concerning to-2m Dm

“and what’s your opinion, do you prefer a fixed work schedule or one in shifts, as far as you are concerned that is” (emirates)

the narrator is describing how one time he was hitchhiking. his inter-locutor interrupts him asking:

inta kən-t mətərayyi ħad yaʕni you were-2m waiting someone Dm “you were waiting for someone in particular?” (emirates)

speaker B seeks confirmation that she understood the meaning of il-maqaahi correctly.

a: il-gahaawi illi bi li-kweet, il-maqaahi, š fii-č? DeF-cafés.Pl that in DeF-Kuwait DeF-cafés.Pl what exists-2F

B: internet kafey yaʕni? internet café Dm

a: “the coffee houses that are in Kuwait, the coffee houses, what’s wrong with you?

B: “the internet cafe you mean?” (Kuwait)

6mustafa mughazy (p.c.) points out that yaʕni can be used with wh-questions when a meta question is intended. For instance, in an exchange miin raaħ yaʕni “who went (do you mean)?” the speaker uses yaʕni to confirm whether he or she has cor-rectly understood the question. note that this turns the wh-question into a yes-no request.

yaʕni: What it Really Means 11

15. marks echo reply a: he naʕm, a-rúuħ u á-rəd il-ʔarbaʕ yes yes 1sG-go and 1sG-return DeF-wednesday

B: il-ʔarbaʕ yaʕni ha d-dəwaam haaδ il-isbuuʕ yaʕni DeF-wednesday Dm Dem DeF-work Dem DeF-week Dm

a: right. i go and return on wednesday B: On wednesday right, this work is this week (yaʕni) then. (emirates)

16. “you might say, as it were” two youths are finding it impossible to find a taxi in the middle of the

night in al-ain. in the end they find one:

wə illaagee-na tiksi, raħam-na yaʕni and found-1Pl taxi 3m.mercied-1Pl Dm “and we found a taxi, you might say he (the taxi driver) pitied us”

(emirates)

…w ʕaš-t aħsan fatra fii ħayaat-i yaʕni and lived-1sG best period in life-my Dm “and i lived the best period of my life, you might say” (Jeddah)

17. “in fact” “if you pick up hitchhikers you’re asking for trouble”:

a fa baʕdeen i-saww-oo l-ək məškila kibiira and then 3m-make-Pl to-2m problem big

B he məshkíla yes problem

a məškíla kibiira jiddan yaʕni, problem big very Dm

a and then they cause you big trouble B ya, trouble a very big trouble (yaʕni) in fact (emirates)

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18. “in sum” ar is explaining what his friend did during the id. the first (italicized)

yaʕni describes the id celebration. the third token (“in sum”) is ar’s response to Bi, summarizing all the social obligations and events con-nected with the id.

B farħ il-ʕiid, il ʕiid ʕibaara ʕan, raaħa yaʕni, fatərət joy DeF-eid DeF-eid expression about rest Dm period

ir-raaħa wə lixaaʔ, been, been il-ʔahal DeF-rest and meeting between between DeF-family

wə l-aṣdixaa yaʕni, baʕid and DeF-friend.Pl Dm so on

Bi ziyaara-at visits-Pl

B he ziyaara-at wə haaδa yaʕni, yes visits-Pl and Dem Dm

B the joy of the eid celebration, the eid celebration is about relaxing, ya know and a time of relaxing and meeting with relatives and friends ya know, and so on

Bi visits B right visits and this (type of thing) ya know. (emirates)

after a discussion about everywhere speaker B has traveled, speaker a concludes:

maa-ša-llah ta-baarak aļļaah yaʕni tnaggal-ti w ruħ-ti katiir by God 2F-bless GOD Dm moved-2F and went-2F many

maħall-aat places-Pl

“wow, so in sum you’ve moved around and been to a lot of places” (Jeddah)

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19. “as a result” shopping during the ʕid is a hassle, because:

zaħama leena-ma yu-uṣel maħall waaħid maħall-een yaʕni, crowding until 3m-arrives store one stores-DUal Dm

yi-tʕab fi t-təsawwəg 3m-tires in DeF-shopping

“Crowded, so that by the time he’s gone to one or two stores, as a result he gets tired of shopping.” (emirates)

these are a sample of plausible translations of yaʕni, tailored to dif-ferent contexts. the translations encompass not only a range of mean-ings, but also illocutionary types, including both answers and questions. the meanings are multifarious, and in the examples in subsequent sec-tions, further meanings will emerge. a single meaning is not obvious from the translations. the summary given in this section would tend to support Fraser’s perspective of Dm’s as having a pragmatic meaning dependent on their context of use.

3.3 meaning, function of yaʕni, part B an alternative approach is the minimalist. yaʕni has a meaning, but it is a very general one. we would suggest that a core meaning is to signal that the speaker will elaborate on the topic which has been be-gun. we will expand on this characterization below in this section, after presenting our material. we divide elaboration into three basic sub-categories: what is elab-orated after yaʕni delivers more specific information that what was said, it generalizes from what was said, or introduces information of the same status, as for instance in a paraphrase. we would note that we introduce this three-part division as an orientation for potential finer-grained translation. we do not regard the tri-partitite division to be a part of the meaning of yaʕni itself.

3.3.1 Continue what comes after yaʕni is a continuation of what has gone before. what comes after yaʕni is neither more nor less specific than what pre-cedes. this can have the nature of paraphrase.


20. Describing the driver who has picked him up as a hitchhiker, the driver went to the other lane (when passing) and stayed there; in other words, she didn’t go back.

wə ta-axəð seed-ha yaʕni, ma tə-rjaʕ and 3F-takes lane-3F Dm neG 3F-return “and she takes her lane, i mean, she doesn’t go back” (emirates)

in some cases, a simple synonym is introduced (see 6.5 below).

21. yimkin hu ṣaaħib-a yaʕni, ṣadiiq-a maybe he friend-3m Dm friend-3m “maybe he’s his friend, i mean his friend” (emirates)

3.3.2 specify the most frequent sub-function in terms of ‘elaboration’ is specifi-cation: the element marked by yaʕni specifies in greater detail what has gone before.

22. a group of youths don’t want to pay the higher taxi fare asked of them. they point out that there’s a meter and (more specifically) that the fare should be six dirhams:

fi ʕaddaadt, fi ʕaddaad yaʕni ʕaddaad sitt dirham there is meter there is meter Dm meter six dirham “there’s a meter, a meter, ya know (by meter it’s) six dirham”. (emir-

ates)

which type of student?

laakin kun-t a-šuuf ṭullaab hina, yaʕni amrikaan but was-1sG 1sG-see students.Pl here Dm americans.Pl “but i would see students here, ya know, americans” (Jeddah)

in the following, the relative clause which explains the first statement is introduced by yaʕni.

23. a ma t-insa l-baxšiiš neG 2m-forget DeF-tip B naʕam yes


A yaʕni illi inta it-ħallig bi Dm that you 2m-get shaved by

a and don’t forget the tip B right a i mean for whom you get your hair cut with. (emirates)

when does he work?

24. aaxar il-leel yaʕni min sitt min aa … ʕašar fi leel end DeF-night Dm from six from ah... ten in night yi-nzil ti-səbbəħ 3m-goes down 3m-wakes up

“end of the night (yaʕni), from six, ah, from ten at night he goes down and he wakes up”

3.3.3 Generalize what follows yaʕni generalizes what has gone before.

25. On the topic of work regimen, the speaker explains why in europe those who work on holidays receive higher pay.

fa leelit raas əs-sina yimkin leel y-istílim fii-ha alf, and night new year maybe night 3m-receives in-it.F thousand

yaʕni ma ħad y-ibi i-daawəm Dm neG somebody 3m-wants 3m-work

“and the evening of the new year in a night he gets maybe one thou-sand. Because no one wants to work then” (emirates)

3.4 a minimalist summary within the minimalist perspective, yaʕni signals that what is coming is of a semantic nature comparable to what has gone before. an analogy can be drawn in set-relation terms: what follows is of the same order, is included in, or is more general than what precedes. Crucially, it is quali-tatively of the same order as what it is linked to. the relation recalls the idea of a badal in the arabic linguistic tradition, an item which further


specifies a preceding noun, being identical with it (huwa huwa) or a part of it (huwa baʕḍuhu) (al-sarraaj ii. 46).7 as can be seen, yaʕni can function as a link at different levels of units, in particular, both entire propositions and smaller constituent-level items. the units it links are in some sense “conceptual” ones (see below for discussion), referring expressions of one sort or another. Furthermore, the semantic link is one in which B is of a comparable semantic order, explicating a in some way, and pragmatically relevant to a. we therefore suggest as a general characterization of the meaning of yaʕni the following, which we term the basic meaning.

Basic meaning

Aconcept yaʕni + Bconcept

where a and B are semantically comparable and B complements the meaning of a

yaʕni signals that concept B is related to a comparable, preceding concept a. B is basically in a logical “and” relation to a, not an “or” or “but”.

thinking in terms of a time-stamped representation, a rough infor-mational interpretation can be given as follows, where the link between a and B is bidirectional

signals additional information is coming →Aconcept yaʕni Bconcept ← tells listener to relate propositional content to what was previously uttered

7there are few if any examples which correspond to the badal al-γalaṭ, the mistake substitution, even though yaʕni will sometimes become involved in false starts and repairs (see section 6.3). this is for two reasons. First the badal is a nominal category, and so one noun needs to be juxtaposed against another. where yaʕni is used in the context of repairs, it is usually that it appears to flag the beginning of a proposition (not a single noun), which does not get completed. secondly, the badal al-γalaṭ is used to contrast two referents, whereas yaʕni is essentially additive.


Generally yaʕni occurs at the beginning of (utterances encoding) concept B, but as in (16-18), it may also occur at the end of it. related to a question, it usually occurs utterance final (14). Comparing this approach with that described in the previous section, we prefer the minimalist, as in the multi-definitional approach either yaʕni turns out to be very polysemous, or a further definition is needed to join the various usages. this latter step would amount to something along a minimalist definition as described in this section. Furthermore, as the contexts of yaʕni are so multifarious, the polysemous approach would require an almost open-ended set of definitions. Other problems with the polysemous approach can be mentioned. the polysemous approach would probably have problems where sen-tences have multiple tokens of yaʕni, as in (12) above. while repeated tokens is an issue requiring greater study, it might be suggested in the current context that multiple yaʕni’s in the same sentence realize the same function of linking yaʕni B with a preceding context. For instance, the larger context of (12) is as follows.

27. fa fi naas yaʕni i-waaṣil-uun nafs abu xaaləd, and there are people Dm 3-continue-Pl same abu Khaaled

i-waaṣəl kull il-yoom, yi-ṭlaʕ ma ša allaah, yaʕni 3m-continues every DeF-day 3m-go out by God Dm bu xaalid yaʕni mitmassik bi ṣəļ-aaṭ yaʕni abu Khalid Dm steadfast in prayer-Pl Dm

“and there are people ya know who do the same as abu Khalid; he continues at it every day; he goes and my gosh i mean abu Khalid i mean is steadfast in his prayers ya know.”

abu Khaalid is like others who go to the mosque every day. he is a specific instance of the general class, hence yaʕni here falls within type 3.3.2. yaʕni could occur at the beginning of the sentence, or at the end, or, as here, in both positions, but it realizes the same function.8 Try-ing to specify discrete, individual meanings for each token of yaʕni is somewhat forced here.

8the medial occurrence of yaʕni could fall within the “focus” usage of yaʕni dis-cussed in section 5, though we will not pursue this further here.


at the same time, the minimalist characterization is compatible with all of the meanings illustrated in 3.2, though it of course more general. in e.g. (12/27) for instance, yaʕni introduces a specification of the main point. we would further argue against the ‘radical pragmatist’ position, that yaʕni does indeed have an identifiable core meaning. rather than merely assert this, however, beyond suggesting a general meaning which at least is compatible with most tokens (see section 5) in our corpus, we would like to move one stage further and suggest that further indices support our approach. the following remarks, are, as our designation of them implies, of indexical nature, suggestive of support of our ‘se-mantic’ position, while allowing that they are inherently imbued with interpretive uncertainty.

3.4.1. yaʕni as paradigmatically contrastive elementFirst, the presence of yaʕni is different from the presence of other dis-course markers on the one hand, and from Ø on the other. in a classic structuralist sense, its presence in a sentence is paradigmatically con-trastive. For instance, if instead of (11a), one substituted the not unre-lated (see 6.1 below) Dm bas the meaning would be different.

28. fa hu ṭabʕan rəyyaal ṭayyib bas haaδa đaabət ṭayyib and he of course man good just Dem officer good “and he of course was a good man, he was just a good officer” (emir-

ates)

bas in this context would change the meaning of utterance consider-ably (and in fact, would not be appropriate at this place in the original text). it would impart an idea of finality to the utterance, suggesting, for instance, that the episode at this point was about the character of the of-ficer, rather, as it is in reality, about the narrator’s run-in with the law. yaʕni, on the other hand, explicitly signals that descriptive material of the same order is being added and therefore the story remains about the topic of the episode which was begun before (28) was uttered, which pertained to the behavior of the narrator and his friend when he was young. Furthermore, any yaʕni can be substituted for by Ø. however, yaʕni, as opposed to Ø, creates the expectation that further information of the


same kind will be forthcoming.

29. fa hu ṭabʕan rəyyaal ṭayyib, Ø haaδa đaabət ṭayyib and he of course man good Dem officer good “and he of course was a good man, Ø he (was) a good officer” (emir-

ates)

(29) is propositionally equivalent to (11a), the only difference being that yaʕni explicitly signals that an element such as haaδa đaabət ṭayyib is coming (see 6.4 below for further)

3.4.2 Prosodic position yaʕni, like many discourse markers, occurs frequently at the edge of utterances; both post-pause (utterance initially) and pre-pause (utter-ance finally). in all, yaʕni occurs in 43% of its tokens either utterance initially or finally:

pre-pause post-pause no pause 179, 25% 129, 18% 411, 57%

Given this high percentage of peripheral occurrence, yaʕni on a prioristic summary appears to be a discourse boundary marker (mae-schler 1994), though what it explicitly marks is the lack of a new topic or episode. it shares this position with such Dms as bas “just, only”, fa “and then (initial only)”, he walla “absolutely”, yaa X, “vocative”, aʕtaxəd “i believe”, ma dri “i don’t know” and tadriin “ya’ know”, ma sha allaa “wow, great”. a preliminary look at the prosodic characteristics of items at the utterance periphery indicates that parallel to the paradigmatic character-istics of yaʕni discussed in the previous section; prosodic characteristics can be identified as well. lacking a full sale analysis of the prosodic structure of our sample, we use the analytic terminology of Badawi (1965), one of the most detailed studies of intonation in spoken arabic, and based on a related peninsular arabian dialect, najdi of riyaadh. in brief, he identifies tone groups, marked by characteristic pitch patterns. a tone group, (1) ends in a tonic syllable, (2) is delimited initially by pause or it occurs after another tone group. the tonic syllable itself is typically the most promi-

�0 Jonathanowens&trentrockwood

nent, has the strongest stress in the group, and has a marked tone move-ment.9 yaʕni in its basic meaning will typically occur in a prosodic po-sition occupied by certain other Dms as identified above. these are morphemes which signal cataphoric or anaphoric coherency relations, and which, given their peripheral position, potentially signal discourse boundaries, or, in the case of yaʕni, generally the lack thereof. these Dms typically occur either in post tonic position, after the tonic syllable which marks the information peak in the tone group, what Badawi terms the post-tonic extension, or in a pre-tonic position at the very beginning of a tone group. in each case it has a distinctly low pitch. the following pertains to the prosodic analysis of emirati ara-bic. we give four examples, one each with yaʕni in pre- and post-tonic position, and one each with other Dms of similar status in the same positions.

Post tonic position, utterance finally10

(30) yaʕni

9this corresponds roughly with the nuclear syllable in the autosegmental tradition (Pierrehumbert 1987: 18).10this would appear to correspond to a pattern such as Badawi describes on p. 149 (also 64, 67), in which the tonic syllable falls from mid to low, and post tonic syl-lables are low. although Badawi does not deal specifically with discourse particles, it is noteworthy that in his examples, haaðaaka xuu ya rajjaal, the post tonic element is a vocative, ya rajjaal, which in our data is also frequently rendered with a low pitch.

yaʕni: What it Really Means �1

ma fii-ha dowwaar-aat a-ʕtaxədt neG exist-it.F roundabouts-Pl 1sG-believe “there aren’t any roundabouts in it, i believe” (emirates)

in (31) the tonic syllable dowwaaraat begins at ? hz. ends at 168 hz and the following aʕtaxədt picks up at 126 hz.

fa fi šibaab hini yaʕni and exist guy.Pl here Dm “and there are guys here y’know” (emirates)

in (32), the tonic syllable (hi)ni has a peak of 253 hz., falling rap-idly to 253 hz., and then to yaʕni, which starts at 176hz and ends at 157.

(31) aʕtaxədt

�� Jonathanowens&trentrockwood

Pre-tonic position, utterance initially

(32) yaʕni

yaʕni šu i-soww-uun? Dm what 3-do-Pl “so what do they do?” (emirates) (33) faa

faa haaδa r-rayyaal and Dem DeF-man “and this man” (emirates)

yaʕni: What it Really Means ��

in each of these two examples, yaʕni in (32) and fa in (33) begin on an appreciably lower frequency than the following word. in the first, yaʕni begins at 136 hz, ending at 163, while the peak on shu immedi-ately after is 227hz. in the second, fa begins at 151hz, drifting down slightly to 174 hz, followed by a peak on haaδa at 222hz. what we suggest these examples show is that yaʕni not only com-mutes with certain Dms, as described in 3.4.1, but often does so in a prosodic position which distinguishes it, and other members of its com-mutational class, as peripheral to the main informational event of an utterance. its consistent mapping onto this prosody again indicates that it has a meaning, searching out, as it were, its usual place in an utter-ance.

3.4.3 thirdly, in a recent paper Germanos (2006) describes the lebanese arabic Dm enno. she notes that enno has a profile very similar to yaʕni. Often inno adds a nuance or condition to a previous utterance, as she puts it (2006: 13).11 in the following, for instance, yaʕni would fit very well in place of her attested inno.

34. hallaʔ oo ʕinde əl-english ʔinno ktiir mniiħ fi-ya w ktiir now at-3m DeF-english Dm very good at-it.F and much

b-ħəbb-a COnt-3m-likes-it.F “now aah he has english ya know he’s very good at it and likes it a

lot”

it appears that enno here is competing for the same semantic space as yaʕni. such a competitive model implies that speakers identify the lexemes enno and yaʕni as semantic units, which can be slotted into identical contexts.12

11Describing the function of enno, she writes (2006: 7): “…there is a continuity in the topic that is under discussion, and this continuity serves to further elaborate the topic”. 12Germanos points out that some speakers in her sample use enno to a far greater extent than others, suggesting that in her Beirut sample enno and yaʕni are stylistic alternatives.


4. interpretive perspectives at this point, having introduced our material and argued that yaʕni has a discrete, if general, meaning, it is relevant to speculate further about the nature of yaʕni itself, or to phrase the matter in different terms, the status of the discourse marker which yaʕni is. this can be approached from two perspectives, drawing on a Grice-an pragmatic tradition. the problem in this tradition is the categorical status of Dms. it is commonly held that Dm’s do not contribute to the truth-conditional meaning of a sentence. if this is the case, what is their conceptual status? the purpose of this section is to outline possible generalizing per-spectives on the function of yaʕni, not to advocate the adoption of one approach or the other and therefore we will not address the pros and cons of adopting one theoretical positions or another.

4.1 yaʕni as tacit performative rieber (1997) argues that connective Dms such as “but”, “more-over” and “so” can be understood as implicit performatives. he analy-ses the sentence, 35. sheila is rich but she is unhappy

as

36. sheila is rich (i suggest that this contrasts) she is unhappy

the conjunction “but” has the semantic component of “contrast”. in using “but” a speaker insinuates a contrast between the two proposi-tions (sheila is rich, she is unhappy), but as this is only a suggestion it does not affect the truth-conditional status of the two conjuncts (if sheila happens to be both rich and unhappy, (36) is still true, as it is the speaker’s suggestion). in defining the connective as a tacit performative, rieber avoids having to give a truth-conditional interpretation to “but” itself, since the performative verb itself does not depend on the truth-conditional status


of its embedded clause. in one formulation, performatives do not have a truth value.13

applying this analysis to yaʕni, and adapting a meta-language from standard arabic in order to underline the fact that it is a meta-language, (11a/29) can be understood along the following lines14

37. fa hu ṭabʕan rəyyaal ṭayyib yaʕni (= wa uḍiif ilaa ðaalik ʔanna-hu) and he of course man good Dm (= and i add to this that …)

haaδa đaabət ṭayyib Dem officer good

“and he of course was a good man, i mean, [i add to this] this was a good officer” (emirates)

in general, yaʕni = uḍiif ilaa ðaalik (i add to this)

4.2 yaʕni as procedural knowledge a second perspective is to adopt the broad analysis of connectives which has been developed in relevancy theory and widely used in the analysis of discourse particles (e.g. a number of articles in Jucker and Ziv 1998). whereas rieber’s treatment assimilates connectives to perfor-mative sentence semantics, the procedural knowledge approach locates them among a class of words which do not contribute to propositional meaning. Procedural meaning (wilson and sperber 1993) conveys in-formation about how best to construe conceptual meaning, propositions which are amenable to truth-conditional analysis. it does this by con-straining inferences which can be drawn on propositions. a standard example is

(38a) tom can open Bill’s safe. (b) he knows the combination. (schourup 1999: 245).

as it stands, (38b) can be understood as a conclusion to an inference with the proposition in (38a) as its premise (since he can open the safe,

13see larcher (1992) for a related performative-verb interpretation of laakinna “but” in the treatment of the thirteenth century grammarian astaradabadhi (e.g. ii: 360, 379). 14ironically, the performative analysis restores yaʕni to a verbal status it has lost.


i conclude that he knows the combination) or as a premise to a conclu-sion stated in (38a) (since he knows the combination, he can open the safe). adding the Dm so to the sentence

39. tom can open Bill’s safe. so he knows the combination.

selects the first interpretation. (Blakemore 2002: 478). From this perspective, yaʕni would be seen as a word which advises the hearer that what is coming, or what has just been said, is related to what has gone before, and that it should be inferred that this is informa-tion of the same type.15 it would also invite the listener to make further inferences about the relation between a and B, for instance adding vari-ous meanings given in section 3.2 above and section 6 below.16

5. yaʕni as focus marker whereas to this point the meaning of yaʕni has been described as connecting two concepts, there is a further set of examples in our cor-pus, comprising about 15% of all tokens in our narrower sample, where such a linking function is not readily discernible. relevant examples include (4b, 6, 8, 9b, 10a) above, as well as the following.

40 ( = 3) a. the speaker describes hitchhiking, where a driver offers to take him to

a point halfway to where he wants to go.

gaal l-i ha axuu-y ween raayiħ? gi-t 3m-said to-1sG hey brother-1sG where going? told-1sG

l-a raayiħ il ʕeen. gaal l-i ana raayiħ to-3m going il- ʕeen. 3m-said to-1sG i going

15From a relevancy theory perspective, yaʕni has the contextual effect of strengthen-ing existing assumptions. 16related to the these two treatments, a third perspective is to regard yaʕni as a type of ‘utterance modifier’. this is a term used by Bach (1999: 356) to describe words (locutions) to ‘comment on the main part of the utterance’. as in the previous two treatments, utterances are divided into propositional material and other material. in english, utterance modifiers are such words and phrases as “but, accordingly, above all, confidentially, in addition to, in contrast …” as seen in the semantic characterization of yaʕni in section 3.1 and 3.2, yaʕni touches on a number of these meanings, according to larger context.


aa yaʕni nəss əṭ-ṭariig, ah Dm half DeF-distance

“he said to me, ‘hey brother, where are you going?’ i told him, ‘i’m going to al- ceen’. he told me ‘i’m going ah, like half the distance’”

B. the speaker is describing his hitchhiking in the mid 1980’s (see previ-ous example); it was:

fi xamsa wə samaaniin, aw sitta wə samaaniin, yaʕni in five and eighty or six and eighty, Dm

hum sitta wə samaaniin “ they six and eighty

“in (19)85 or 86, that is they were (working) 1986”.

thereupon, the interlocutor interpolates a comment intended to show that in those days one could hitch a ride, unlike today:

ðiič il-ayyaam ma kaan fi yaʕni nafs ilħiin Dem DeF-days.Pl neG 3m-was exists Dm same now “in those days it wasn’t like i mean (how) it is today”

C. the speaker is describing getting a haircut during the id. while in gen-eral it is difficult to find a barber during this time, nonetheless, some barbers have no clients.

(=8a) wə haakaða, fa fi ħalaaliig, ma ħad i-ħalləg and like this, and there are barbers.Pl, neG person 3m-is shaved

ʕind-um, leeš? ma fii-hum, yaʕni maħaara fi l-ħəlaaga, at-3Pl, why? neG at-3Pl Dm skill in DeF-shaving

“and so on. and there are barbers who don’t have any (customers). why? they don’t have, shall we say, any skill in cutting hair.

in (40a) there is no explicit element a which nəss əṭ-ṭariig links to. in (40b) the post-posed subject of existential fi, nafs ilħiin semantically parallels the time adverbial ðiič il-ayyaam, but what is expressed in (40b) is a clear contrast between the two eras. if yaʕni is expressing an


additive function in (40b), unlike all examples discussed thus far, it is adding a contrast, not complementary knowledge. in (40c) yaʕni marks the peak of the information segment, the reason the barbers have no clients. On the basis of these examples (as well as those noted above), we would therefore suggest that a general function of yaʕni is to focus a particular constituent. whereas in its basic function it tends to occur ut-terance initially or finally (see 3.4.2), here it always occurs in the middle of an utterance before the constituent whose focus it marks. in the three examples above in fact, it occurs before the constituent containing the tonic (nuclear) syllable of the phonetic utterance, the syllable marking the prosodic information peak in the phrase. in our narrow 300 token sample, in the majority of cases (20/32) yaʕni as focus marker occurs marking the new informational sector of the phrase, occurring either pre-predicate or before a constituent in a predicate, such as the direct object. while these usages do not link two explicitly stated parallel ele-ments, as in the basic meaning, they do appear to contain an implicit parallel one. the focus function can thus be seen in pragmatization terms as adventitious upon the basic meaning. in the examples above, for instance, the implications are as follows:

41. nəss əṭ-ṭariig “half way to where you want to go” (not the whole way)

social relations nafs il-ħiin “now” (not so good as before) ma fiihum , yaʕni maħaara “no skill” (whereas those with clients do

have the skill)

as in the basic meaning of yaʕni (see 3.4 above), the focused ele-ment is linked with another element of comparable status, except that in this case it is an implied element. the “B” part of the basic meaning is left unexpressed. Furthermore, unlike the basic meaning, there is an implicit contrast, not addition of information of the same type. these differences can be seen by adding a hypothetical extension to the examples. in (40a), the one who offered the ride could, in theory, have said, ana raayiħ yaʕni nəss əṭ-ṭariig bas, “i’m only going half of the way”, with the addition of the adversative/limiter bas. Bas, unlike


yaʕni, does not necessarily create the expectation of a further proposi-tion. while this would not have been appropriate in this situation (from a politeness perspective, why would he have stopped just to tell him he was only going half way), it would be possible where it was the hitch-hiker who initially asked the driver (parked on the road) for a ride. what this indicates is that yaʕni as a focus marker commutes with Dms which do not necessarily create the expectation of a further proposition. it can be noted in this context that one Kuwaiti speaker uses yaʕni three times before codeswitched english constituents, as in

42. iħna ʕind-na baʕad yaʕni spešal gaðering we at-3Pl Dm Dm special gathering “we have additionally ya know a special gathering” (Kuwait)

i-rawwi haw mač il-ʔaayila yaʕni kan spend ʕala wild-ha 3m-shows how much DeF-family Dm can spend on child-3F “it shows how much the family ya know can spend on its child.” (Ku-

wait)

while not all her codeswitches are flagged with yaʕni, where they are they mark a focus on a special code, english, which in the current text is far less frequent than is arabic. the implied focus contrast here is between languages: yaʕni english (not arabic) is coming’.17

6. Further aspects of yaʕni in this final descriptive section we would like to touch briefly on six further aspects of yaʕni which are prominent in our data.

6.1 collocations yaʕni collocates to some degree with other discourse markers, and with conventionalized predicates. we describe three of the most fre-quent ones here.

maʕruuf yaʕni (5 tokens), the association between maʕruuf “it’s known” and following yaʕni is transparent: something is known, maʕruuf, and

17Germanos similarly notes that ʔinno not infrequently introduces a language switch in her Beirut corpus.


now (yaʕni) i’ll say what it is.

43. haaδa soʕuuba, haaδi miškila fi l-jeeš maʕruuf-a yaʕni Dem difficulty Dem problem in DeF-army known-F Dm “this is a difficulty, this is a problem in the army; it’s known of course”

(emirates)

bass yaʕni (7 tokens bass yaʕni, 7 yaʕni bass)

along with yaʕni, bass is one of the most frequent Dms, like yaʕni requiring separate study to tease out its various discourse functions. in contrast to yaʕni, the Dm bass often has an adversative, limiting or con-trastive meaning. where it collocates with yaʕni it is bass which sets the illocutive tone. in the following examples, yaʕni, as usual, marks basic topic continuity, while bass marks a contrast

44. 1: aw yi-štir-uun beet aw šey, mumkin iše, yaʕni or 3-buy-Pl house or thing maybe something Dm

mu šarṭ inna ħayaat-hum t-ṣiir asʕad mu neG condition that life-3Pl 3F-become happier neG

bi-ḍ-ḍaruura, bass yaʕni ʕa-l-aqall il-mašaakil šwayya aqall necessarily Dm Dm at least DeF-problem.Pl little less

“Or they buy a house or something, maybe something, i mean, it’s not necessarily the case that their life should become happier automatically, it’s just that at least the problems will be fewer” (Kuwati)

yaʕni fa (15 tokens)

yaʕni fa is a natural progression and occurs in this sequence in 15 tokens (as well as 3 fa yaʕni 18). whereas yaʕni anchors the segment in its scope to the preceding utterance, fa signals a move to a new topic, or to the next stage in the present topic. in the following, the speaker sums up his story about a mild run-in with the police in his youth with yaʕni. he continues a new episode,

18Of these three, one is a false start (see 6.3).

yaʕni: What it Really Means �1

introducing it with fa.

46. ayyaam ṭufuula yaʕni, fa marra ya ṭəwiil il-ʕamər, fi days.Pl childhood Dm and once oh long DeF-life there is

waaħid min it-təħarriy-aat, min ha əš-šorṭa, one of DeF-investigation-Pl from Dem DeF-police

“(those were) the days of youth ya know. and then let’s see, there was one of the investigations, by the police …” (emirates)

6.2 Conversational dynamics: yaʕni as turn holder looking at yaʕni in basic conversational analytic terms, it can be considered a marker of turn holding (rather than speaker switch). in our 719 tokens, only 23 or 3.2 % occur in the context:

47. speaker a speaker B yaʕni …

all of the rest are speaker turn internal. this accords with the basic meaning of yaʕni, which is to signal the continuity of adjacent concepts, and this is best preserved within a speaker turn. By contrast, the Dm fa, which, roughly, signals a move to a new topic, has comparatively more turn-initial tokens, 19/192, or 10% of all its tokens. even where there is a speaker switch, yaʕni still usually maintains topic continuity. For instance, in the following the daughter asks her mother about whether the ħinna party is part of the wedding prepara-tion. the mother begins her turn with yaʕni, the word following it a pronominal demonstrative subject, to underscore the point that yaʕni is here in the realm of familiar information.

48. B: yi-guul-uun iħna ma n-sawwi ħinna 3-say-Pl we neG 1Pl-do henna party A: yaʕni haδeela mumkin ma y-kuun-uun il, min il, Dm Dem-Pl maybe neG 3-are-Pl the from the min il-γalibiyya … from DeF-majority


B they say we don’t do the henna party A1 i mean those ones it’s possible that they aren’t, the … of the majority

(Kuwait)

the lack of yaʕni at turn-initial position is thus probably not so a much a property of yaʕni as such, as the propensity of speaker switch to coincide with significant topic change. this merits further investiga-tion. it is relevant to mention here an appealing dichotomy of Dms pro-posed by Jucker and smith (1998: 178, 197) into reception and presen-tation markers. reception markers (like naʕam “yes, ok”, nzeen “good, okay”, mbala “to the contrary”) signal reception of information whereas presentation markers signal that information will be given out. Clearly yaʕni is a presentation marker, as it signals that the speaker will elaborate and qualify what has been said. Jucker and smith show on a quantitative basis from a sample taken on the west coast of the Us that reception markers are more common among pairs of strangers speaking with one another, whereas presentation markers predominate among friends. their explanation is that presentation markers imply a shared world of knowledge facilitating movement of information, and that such sharedness exists especially among friends. while our sample is too small to make definitive judgments in this respect, it can be noted that Kuwait and Jedda have approximately the same number of yaʕni tokens, 145 and 150 respectively, though the first is a mother-daughter pair, the second two speakers who had never met before the interview. relative to the total words in the texts, in fact, yaʕni in the Kuwait text is slightly over proportional. we would tentatively suggest that it is not the role relationship be-tween the interlocutors which is the more important factor, but rather a more formal genre engendered by the interview situation (see 6.5), and that in this context, a presentational marker such as yaʕni emerges as the interlocutors strive for clarity and explicitness.

6.3 repair, disfluency, and hesitation while yaʕni itself does not mark disfluencies, it not infrequently (19 tokens in our 300 token narrower corpus) is caught in the middle of them, as it were. in the following, for instance, the speaker has been describing the


actions of a police officer who threatened to arrest him once when he was a youth. in the end he did not. the speaker first calls him a good officer, yaʕni follows, which sets up the expectation of a further charac-terization of the officer, but then the speaker changes his characteriza-tion of the officer from a description of his character to one in which the officer is fulfilling a role, by implication properly.

49. haaða đaabet ṭayyib hu yaʕni maṣlaħa yaʕni, haay maṣlaħa Dem officer good he Dm official duty Dm Dem official duty “this was a good officer he ya know an official duty ya know. This is

a duty.” (emirates)

yaʕni at one and the same time appears to signal a disfluency, but also to transition to the new description, which is ultimately formulated in the well-formed sentence, haay maṣlaħa. as an utterance may be broken off after yaʕni, yaʕni is the word that in this context will be caught holding the bag as it were, so yaʕni itself may appear to be a marker of hesitation. For instance, a speaker describes the difficulty of traveling between Dubai and al-ain at a time when a road was being built. he appears at one point to leave three fragments describing the difficulty one after the other, two of them closed by yaʕni.

50. ma nigdar yaʕni, miš dayman , iṣ-ṣaʕib yaʕni neG 1sG-can Dm neG always DeF-difficult Dm “we couldn’t i mean, not always, (it was) difficult i mean”. (emir-

ates)

in our interpretation, yaʕni is thrown out here, waiting for the cor-rect formulation to catch up with it and be placed after it. if it isn’t, an effect of hesitation and disfluency will result. in (49) the speaker man-ages the repair quickly and completely. in (50) the ultimate effect is less successful.19

19a full account of repairs would need to recognize phonetic gestures which, in con-trast to yaʕni, do appear to be dedicated to hesitation and repair, for instance aaaa, spoken with creaky voice, as in … haaða kaan aaaa kətiibte iruuħuun is-səʕuudiyya, “(now) this one aaaa, his platoon was going to saudi arabia”. this is spoken at the beginning of an episode, where it appears that the speaker is lining up his strategy of presentation, hesitating after mentioning the topic.


it is also probable that yaʕni is sometimes inserted to play for time while the speaker is looking for a correct formulation. in the following the speaker hesitates slightly after taʕliimi before continuing with yaʕni + time expression. the entire formulation is rather long (during my days in school as well as now …),20 and yaʕni may be interpolated to allow the speaker to line up the rest of her utterance formulation.

51. ana ħaass-a innu ana yaʕni taʕliim-i yaʕni fii i feeling-F that i Dm education-1sG Dm in

zamaan-i w ilʔaan kamaana, al-manaahij ʕind-ana fi time-1sG and now also DeF-program.Pl at-1Pl in

s-suʕudiyya kwéyisa, DeF-saudi arabia good

“i feel that i, i mean my teaching, i mean during my time (as a teacher) and now as well, that our curriculum in saudi arabia is good.” (Jed-dah)

6.4 Politeness yaʕni can sometimes be viewed as a marker of politeness. this is a derivative of its functional logic. to illustrate this point, in the Jeddah texts the two women often disagree on issues. One of the speakers (a) is aggressive in putting over her points, the other (B) more conciliatory in replying. B frequently intersperses her replies with yaʕni’s, as in the following. speaker a suggests ironically that B should not long for the weather in Jeddah. B defends her longing for Jeddah, interposing two yaʕni’s.

52. a t-ħinn-i li l-jaww, li l-ħarr w r-ruṭuuba 2-long-F for DeF-weather for DeF-heat and DeF-humidity

lli f jidda? that in Jeddah

20By way of comparison, in our emirati texts over 75% of the complete sentences in the texts are 4 words or less. the current sentence is 17 words long, by contrast.


B naʕam huwa ħarr ṣaħiiħ bass ma z… ma zaal yaʕni yes it hot correct Dm neG neG still Dm

wall… aa… balad-ik, waṭan-ik, wi fii-ha yaʕni ʕaaʔilt-ik, ah country-2F homeland-2F and in-it.F Dm family-2F

a “you long for the weather, the heat and the humidity that’s in Jedda? B yes, that’s true, its just that st … its still i mean wal … your country,

your homeland, and your family is ya know there” (Jeddah)

we would again relate this usage to the ‘maintaining a relevant link between concepts” function of yaʕni. yaʕni acknowledges the point the other has made or what has been said, signaling the relevance of what is being said to a’s utterance. that yaʕni as a politeness marker is de-rivable from this function, can be seen if yaʕni were not used in B’s response in (52). said directly, ma zaal baladik wa fiiha ʕaaʔiltak could implicitly be taken as a direct, abrupt contradiction to what has been said. yaʕni, as seen in section 3.2 above, sets the utterance on the same conceptual level as that to which it is related, so that in the actual con-versation a’s critical utterance is tempered by B’s defense. thus a’s remark that it is very hot and humid in Jeddah is counterbalanced by B’s “its your country”. Paraphrasing the implicit contrast, yaʕni picks up the criticism of a and answers it: “(Jeddah is hot and humid that is true) yaʕni but it’s still your country, and there’s no contradiction in all of these facts contrary to what you imply”.21 yaʕni allows the politeness inference “that is true … but”.

6.5 etc: style, register, geographical spread, diglossia … in this section we would like to touch on a number of diverse is-sues which imply a need for greater study, though are present in a clear enough fashion in our data that they can be at least defined in an ad-equately precise form. while yaʕni is the most widespread morpheme in our sample of texts, it is by no means universal in all dialects or all registers of arabic. in nigerian arabic, for instance, a corpus of 30,000 words yields only 94 tokens, fewer than in any single text in the current study, and all of these are used by speakers who have a background in standard arabic.

21though there are other indications as well, for instance the Dm bas.


yaʕni we believe is not a part of native nigerian arabic. even in the arabian peninsula from where the current texts come, it is clear that the use of yaʕni varies according to register, genre and so-cial situation. looking at the set of texts from Bahrain in holes (2005),22 for instance, in an arbitrary sample of nine texts,23 there are only 16 tokens of yaʕni. these texts (from the 1970’s) were recorded among uneducated speakers and among people who either were close friends, or members of the same larger community. this observation would underscore our remark above in 6.2 that a category such as “presenta-tion marker” does not as such sanction socially-relevant distributions; language and culture-specific factors are always key variables. the significance of genre can also be discerned in our own texts (see also 6.2 above). we divided about 70% of our texts into episodes, “rela-tively bounded sequences within the more comprehensive speech event or encounter as a whole” (linell 1998: 187). the number of yaʕni’s can vary considerably according to the nature of an individual episode. in one, for instance, consisting of 290 words describing the parts of a typi-cal wedding there are no yaʕni’s. in another, consisting of 1,491 words, in which the two interlocutors argue, sometimes vehemently, about the status and state of education in saudi arabia, there are 33 yaʕni’s. we would explain the difference in terms of familiarity of discourse. in describing a wedding, the speaker moves from one event to another within a well-defined frame of reference (lambrecht 1994: 99, sperber and wilson 1995: 88). the events, participants and setting require no qualification or explanation, types of speech acts which yaʕni tends to flag. in the more argumentative segment the same speaker needs to de-fend and explain her position at numerous points, using yaʕni to signal an elaboration or further explanation. (47) above is a representative example from this discourse segment. Diglossia is certainly an aspect of genre and style, and this perva-sive element of arabic is present in our data as well. a good example is (21), repeated here as

22these texts were not edited or cleaned up for register or stylistic reasons (2005: xx). 23Pp. 31-2, 77-85, 130-6, 184-5, 209-12, 233-6, 269-70, 295-7, 321-5.


53. yimkin hu ṣaaħib-a yaʕni, ṣadiiq-a24

maybe he friend-3m Dm friend-3m “maybe he is his friend, i mean his friend” (emirates)

ṣadiiqa cannot be said to add any referential meaning to ṣaaħiba, so what is the purpose of yaʕni here? Probably the speaker was acknowl-edging the presence of an american observer in the conversation, so a standard arabic paraphrase (note /q/ reflex) is in order. sociolinguisti-cally the exchange can be represented:

local variant yaʕni high variant

note further that the codeswitching function of yaʕni illustrated in (42) above goes in a similar direction, from a local variant to a sanc-tioned prestige language, though along a different code parameter:

local language yaʕni international prestige language

Finally, somewhat anecdotally, students learning arabic may be struck by how frequent yaʕni is in their conversations with arabs. speaking with a foreigner, an arab might use a pedagogical mode, one aspect of which is to paraphrase, elaborate and explain, looking for words and formulations which a language learner might understand. as we saw above in 3.3, these are functions par excellence of yaʕni.

24mustafa mughazy points out that the paraphrase ṣadiiq-a may further be motivated by the ambiguity of ṣaaħib-a as “an intimate friend of the same sex”. ṣadiiq-a dis-ambiguates to a simple “friend”.related to this point, intertwined with the low-high dichotomy here is the didactic function which yaʕni can assume in clarification (see 3.3.2). this function was pointed out to us by roni henkin (p.c.). she notes that yaʕni will be used in ne-gev arabic narratives by elders to signal clarification of individual words. in the example, weeš raayak ya… txaawiini, yaʕni inkuun ana wiyyana xwaan “what is your opinion … you become my brother, that is, you and i become brothers”. the definition of xaawa “become brothers” is introduced by yaʕni. in this instance there is also a shift from a ‘local’ variant, one infused with opaque lexical content, to a more transparent clarification, but a clarification equally carried out in the local dialect.


6.6 yaʕni and dictionary meanings Clearly yaʕni, and discourse particles in general, present a challenge to lexicographers. typically Dms have general meanings which can be paraphrased in terms of the contexts they are used in, the effects they have on audiences, the inferences which they invite, and so on, and indeed, proper usage of them requires adherence to such factors. none-theless, descriptive definitions in terms of equivalences in the target language cannot be dispensed with: the dictionary user still needs the support of possible translations. in the future it would be advisable to gloss them both in broad semantico-pragmatic terms, and in terms of a range of translations which may be appropriate on various occasions.

7. yaʕni: meaning and doing Discourse markers can be as much about doing as about meaning. this is certainly the case with yaʕni. its meaning resides in its discourse organizing function, signaling that a semantic unit of comparable status will follow. yaʕni invites inferences about the nature of the relation-ship between the concepts, which gives rise to more specific interpreta-tions.

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yaʕni: what it (really) means

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