Variation in verbal negation in Jordanian Arabic: A corpus-based analysis

Abstract

Jordanian Arabic (JA) has two main patterns for verbal negation, i.e., preverbal negation (ma: ….) and discontinuous negation (ma: …. -ʃ). This article provides a variationist account of the distribution of these two patterns in light of a number of social and linguistic factors. The social factors include age, gender, educational attainment and region. The linguistic factors, on the other hand, include the transitivity of the verb, the tense of the associate utterance, the stativity and the lexical type of the verb (i.e., cognitive, desiderative, speech and perception), as well as the person, animacy and definiteness of the associate subject. Following distributional and multivariate analyses of 40 sociolinguistic interviews (more than 30 hours of audio-recordings), we find that all social factors (education, gender, region and age), the lexical type of the verb, the definiteness of the subject and the tense of the associate utterance have a significant impact on the selection of the negation patterns in JA. Such preferences are argued to follow from independent factors, including the speaker's regional background, gender identity and prestige.