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Routledge Handbook of Corpus Approaches to Discourse Analysis edited by Eric Friginal and Jack A. Hardy, Routledge, 2021, 662pp., $250.00 (Hardcover). ISBN 9780367201814.

This article investigates the discourse functions of ʕaad in Jordanian Arabic (JA), based on a naturally occurring corpus which consists of 20 sociolinguistic interviews with 60 participants. Upon analysing all occurrences of ʕaad in the corpus, we propose that ʕaad is a discourse marker that provides supplementary information that relates the speaker's attitude (i.e., disagreement) to the proposition expressed by the host sentence. Additionally, this article offers a syntactic account of this discourse marker arguing that its distribution (and interpolation) can be syntactically captured. The syntactic analysis is based on the notion of grounding (Wiltschko and Heim, 2016; Thoma, 2016; Wiltschko, 2017a, 2017b). We essentially argue that the marker ʕaad heads the so-called Speaker-oriented Ground Phrase, following its main function in expressing the commitment that the speaker displays towards the proposition rather than asking the addressee for a request of how to respond to the utterance. In so doing, this article adds credence to proposals under which discourse markers can be incorporated within sentence grammar with no need for an extra level of grammar representation (see Potts, 2005; de Vries, 2012; Wiltschko and Heim, 2016).

This study aims to identify the intensifiers used in Ammani Arabic (henceforth AA) and to explore whether or not their use is socially constrained by age, gender, and education. Furthermore, the study attempts to find whether the use of intensifiers throughout this dialect is internally constrained through the examination of the effects of a set of linguistic factors (i.e., the semantic class of adjectives, the function of adjectives [attributive vs. predicative], the position of intensifiers (after the adjective or before it), the polarity of adjectives, and emotionality of adjectives) on the distribution of the intensifiers under investigation. To this end, the study draws on the variationist approach proposed by Labov (1972) as a theoretical construct which focuses on sociolinguistic variations in dialects and investigates how variations can be structured. The corpus is based on just over 15 h of digitized recordings obtained from 32 speakers stratified by age, gender, and education. Then, all tokens including the intensifier (ʔikθi:r) and its variants [ʔikθi::r], [ʔikθi:r ʔikθi:r], and [dʒidan] are extracted and coded. The coded data are afterwards analysed using Goldvarb X, so as to obtain the distribution of the variants, their frequencies and significance regarding their variable use. The results show that the most used intensifier among AA speakers is the intensifier [ʔikθi:r], the social factors (age, gender, and education) have no significant effect on the use of intensifiers in AA, and the intensifier [ʔikθi:r] is found to significantly correlate with the semantic class of adjectives of ‘human propensity’ and to occur more often predicatively in the sentence.

Congratulating others is an essential aspect of human social interaction and a speech act that is realised differently in languages. This study aims to investigate the pragmalinguistic realisations of the speech act of congratulating in Kabyle and Jordanian Arabic (JA) by comparing the strategies that Kabyle-speaking and JA-speaking students employ when offering congratulations. The data are analysed with reference to social status, gender and cultural background of the participants. A Discourse Completion Test (DCT) which included four situations of different social statuses is used to collect data from 30 JA-speaking students (15 males and 15 females) at the University of Jordan and 30 Kabyle-speaking students (15 males and 15 females) from three different universities in Algeria region of Kabylie. Elwood's (2004) framework is adopted in the classification of strategies. A mixed-method approach is applied in the analysis with the frequency of strategies being quantitatively analysed and the semantic formulas vis-à-vis status are qualitatively analysed. The results show that there are slight differences in the use of congratulating strategies between the two groups of participants, and these are discussed in terms of sociopragmatic and sociocultural dimensions of variational pragmatics.