Flavors of Progression in Urban Jordanian Arabic

Abstract

This study investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of three grammaticalized aspectual markers in Urban Jordanian Arabic (UJA): the particle ʕam, the active participle ʕammal, and the active participle ʔaaʕid. While traditionally perceived as markers of progressive aspect with identical semantics, this study distinguishes itself by unveiling significant syntactic and semantic differences among the three markers. In particular, the study shows that ʕammal functions as an inceptive aspect marker, ʕam marks immediate aspect, and ʔaaʕid signals durative aspect. The study provides evidence for this categorization by showing that the markers can co-occur in the same sentence. Such co-occurrence highlights a hierarchical order among the three markers, with ʕammal merging at the highest position, ʔaaʕid merging at an intermediate position, and ʕam situated at the lowest position. To capture this hierarchy, a fine-grained aspectual system is proposed, where each marker heads its own aspectual projection. Evidence from word order and agreement is provided to support this view. The findings of this study align with Cinque's (2006) theory, illustrating diverse progressive aspectual heads that merge at different levels in the extended verbal projection.

Keywords:

• grammaticalization; progressive aspect; Urban Jordanian Arabic; inceptive aspect; immediate aspect; durative aspect

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the reviewers for their valuable comments and constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The following abbreviations are used throughout this paper: 1, 2, 3 = first, second, third person, F = feminine, M = masculine, S = singular, PL = plural, PTCP = participle, PROG = progressive aspect, ACT = active, NEG = negation, IMM = immediate aspect, INCP = inceptive aspect.

2 Unless specified otherwise, the examples used in this paper are from UJA. All the UJA examples were verified with 12 native UJA speakers residing in the western part of Amman.

3 According to Ouali (2022), the full forms of grammaticalized active participles (e.g., gaaʕid and ʕammal) fully agree with the thematic subject in phi-features, whereas the reduced forms (e.g., ʕam and ga) do not. The agreement facts of grammaticalized active participles are fully discussed below.

4 Ouali (2022) does not provide examples where ʕam and ʕammal are used interchangeably. Therefore, we use examples from UJA.

5 Ouali (2022) provides another structure where the main verb and its object are adjuncts to the participle phrase. According to Ouali, this structure has an inherent meaning of sitting. Due to space limitations, we will not provide the structure here. Instead, we refer the interested reader to Ouali (2022) for more details.

6 Following Soltan (2007), Ouali (2022) assumes that imperfective verbs in VSO order move to Asp, whereas perfective verbs move to T.

7 It is reported that ʕam can also mark habitual aspect in Levantine Arabic (Mitchell and El-Hassan 1994). In this paper, we only concern ourselves with the progressive reading, since the focus of the paper is on the different degrees of progression.

8 Note that the difference between gaaʕid in Najdi and Ghamdi Arabic and ʔaaʕid in UJA is dialectal. Some Arabic dialects pronounce the Standard Arabic sound /q/ as /ʔ/ (e.g., Lebanese and Syrian Arabic) whereas others pronounce it as /g/ (e.g., Ghamdi and Najdi Arabic).

9 It is worth mentioning that our definition of ‘immediate aspect’ differs from that of Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca (1994) who note that immediate aspect is “a meaning label that may be combined with other tense labels to indicate a situation not simultaneous with the moment of speech, but very close to it” (Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994, 317).

10 Cowell (1964) discusses the use of the progressive particle ʕam in Syrian Arabic and proposes that it is a marker of “actuality”. According to Cowell (1964, 320) ʕam is “used to designate a state or an activity actually going on at the moment – the true ‘present’ – as opposed to generalities and dispositions”.

11 In the literature, the term durative aspect is sometimes used as an alternative term to refer to delimitative aspect that expresses the short term of a situation (see Dickey 2007). Our use of the term durative here is different in the sense that the event/state, in most cases, is taking place over a relatively long period of time.

12 Similar examples are found in Cheke Holo, where the inceptive marker la co-occurs with the immediate aspect marker me, as seen in (i).

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13 The idea that multiple aspectual markers can co-occur in the same sentence is not new. Zhou (1996) for instance, shows that the perfective/experiential marker -guo co-occurs with the inchoative/completive -le in the same sentence in Mandarin Chinese (MC). Zhou (1996) proposes a Two-Tiered Aspectual System to capture the MC facts. Also, similar co-occurrences are observed in Cheke Holo (see Boswell 2018).

14 Ouali (2022) provides a similar example from Lebanese Arabic (i). However, he does not discuss the example in detail. Instead, Ouali (2022) assumes that such usage of ʔaaʕid is pragmatically motivated to signal the speaker's displeasure with an action or situation.

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In UJA, no such pragmatic effects arise when ʕam and ʔaaʕid co-occur.

15 None of our informants accepted examples where the three markers co-occur simultaneously. In fact, we could not think of a context where the three markers could possibly co-occur. To the best of our knowledge, we find no instances where more than two aspectual markers co-occur at the same time cross-linguistically.

16 The idea that aspectual heads have a hierarchical order is noted and fully discussed in Cinque (1999, 2006).

17 Cinque (2006, 88) proposes that there are two inceptive aspect heads: (i) AspInceptive(I) that merges above VoiceP, marking the beginning of an event at an arbitrary point; and (ii) AspInceptive(II) that merges below VoiceP and marks the beginning of the process at its natural starting point.

18 Other recent Minimalist models of Agree can also capture the agreement facts attested in UJA (e.g., Chomsky, Gallego, and Ott 2019; Pesetsky and Torrego 2007; Preminger 2014, among others). All of these models concur that Agree involves a Probe-Goal relationship followed by feature valuation of unvalued features.

19 For simplicity, we ignore aspectual heads that are not morphologically expressed. We abstract away from discussing the presence/absence of such heads or whether they are simply realized as null morphemes, as is typically assumed for Asp in Arabic (Hallman 2015).

20 We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this line of investigation.

21 A similar pattern is also observed with gaaʕid (sitting) and gaa in Najafi Arabic. Ouali (2022) demonstrates that both markers were derived from the verb qaʕada (sit). In a similar fashion to ʕam and ʕammal, gaaʕid retained its features, whereas gaa has lost its agreement features, as seen in (4) repeated here as (i).

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22 Due to space limitations, we will not delve into van Gelderen’s (2022) approach here. Instead, we refer the interested reader to van Gelderen (2022) for more details.