Phasal polarity in northern rural Jordanian Arabic: beyond a simplified view

Abstract

This paper provides a descriptive account of the phasal polarity system in the Arabic vernacular spoken in the northern rural area of Jordan (NRJA). It demonstrates that this variety has phasal polarity (PhP) items that encode ‘still’, ‘already’, and ‘no longer’. For ‘not yet’, it has no specialized item to encode it. Instead, it is expressed via a ‘still’ item scoping over negation. More intriguingly, this paper shows that NRJA has more than one item for expressing ‘still’, ‘already’, and ‘no longer’. ‘Already’ items and ‘no longer’ items, unlike ‘still’ items, exhibit semantic and pragmatic nuances, and therefore, are not interchangeable, lending further support to the view that PhP should not be oversimplified in understudied languages, as they can differ significantly in their semantic and pragmatic manifestations, even within the same dialectal continuum. This finding, in turn, calls for further scholarly efforts to gain a more comprehensive understanding of PhP within the Arabic dialect continuum, as well as to relate reported observations to previously reported typological patterns of PhP in other languages.