The communicative grammatical function of Cognate Infinitives in Lebanese Arabic

Abstract

Cognate Infinitives have been identified and described as productive linguistic features within Arabic language and along the Semitic continuum. However, the full range of function of Cognate Infinitives remains largely unstudied in the spoken varieties of Arabic. For this reason, the present study aims at describing the (communicative) grammatical function of Cognate Infinitives in Lebanese Arabic. Through the analysis of an extensive corpus of socially and communicatively contextualized data collected over four years of fieldwork and eight years of linguistic and cultural immersion, this study explores the formal and communicative factors that correlate with the use of CIs in LA in order to create a grammatical model upon which the function of the CI in LA may be described. The new grammatical model for the analysis and description of Cognate Infinitives in Lebanese Arabic that this study proposes accounts for this feature’s semantic, informational, affective and social functions. I suggest that Cognate Infinitives function as focus markers and are efficient communicative tools for a variety of attention management actions as well as for ‘face’ management strategies. Moreover, the findings of my research replace the omnipresent notion of ‘adverbial emphasis’ with a definition of “focus” that comprises both informational and affective factors.