Discourse markers as a lens to variation across speech and writing

Abstract

This paper explores the use of the discourse marker (DM) yaʕni (lit. ‘it means’) in spoken and written Egyptian-Cairene Arabic. The DM yaʕni originates in conversational interaction and is symbiotic with its socio-cognitive constraints and goals: it serves to facilitate the verbalization of new or hard-to-activate ideas and to optimize the verbalization of already-introduced ideas, so as to enhance participants’ mutual understanding and involvement. When carried over to written discourse, yaʕni undergoes various forms of adaptation. In casual-personal prose yaʕni is frequently used; however, the distribution of the tokens is different and their function recontextualized. Tokens introducing new ideas are few and acquire symbolic meaning, while tokens introducing elaboration of prior discourse are widely used and serve to evoke conversational interaction. In expository discourse, as reflected in Egyptian Wikipedia data, yaʕni is considerably less frequent and limited to elaborations of concepts and facts. The paper shows the highly context-sensitive function of the DM yaʕni and the ways in which its indexical force, as a marker of conversationality, is either heightened or weakened in writing, depending on the genre in which it is put to use.