THEME AND THE FUNCTION OF THE VERB IN PALESTINIAN ARABIC NARRATIVE DISCOURSE BY ILHAM NAYEF ABU-GHAZALEH A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE COUNCIL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1983 , To my sister SHADYIA, who refused to continue her studies at Cairo University after the final occupation of Palestine in 1967 - She said, before she was killed at the age of -nineteen "WHAT IS THE USE OF A UNIVERSITY DEGREE FOR A PALESTINIAN WHEN HE HAS NO WALL TO HANG IT ON?" . ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My thankfulness to the head of my committee, Dr. Chauncey Chu, is limitless. I am greatly indebted to him for his tireless devotion and generosity in giving of his valuable time to crystallize this work. His kind and patient encourage- ment has been an important factor in my academic growth. My gratitude also goes to the rest of the members of my committee. Dr. Alice Faber's comments, guidance and sup- port sharpened my perception in this analysis. Dr. Bill Sullivan enriched my analysis by helping me see other sides to it. Dr. Robert de Beaugrande always enabled me to put things into perspective through his discussions, concern and encouragement. My discussions with Dr. Rene LeMarchand were of great importance to me. My greatest thanks and love go to my home university, Birzeit, for providing me with this opportunity for growth and enrichment. The difficulties they were enduring while I was far from them constituted a heavy part of my personal suffering To all my friends in Gainesville, in the United States, and at home, go my unlimited love and gratitude. Had it not been for their support through my personal, national and academic difficulties, I doubt I would ever have finished this dissertation. iii My students at the University of Florida brightened ray daily existence by their voracious desire to learn the lan- guage. I owe them special thanks for having taught me the system of Arabic through my teaching it to them. Their struggle to see Arabic taught as regular courses at the Uni- versity endears them to me. My thanks also go to AMIDEAST for making my enrichment, academic and otherwise, in this country possible. Their aca- demic assistance to my home university, Birzeit, is invalu- able to me. My friend Doug Hazen tirelessly waded with me through parts of this dissertation in an endeavor to disentangle my "strange" style; special thanks to him. My thanks and appreciation go to the Palestinians, women and men, who permitted me to tape their stories. Finally, my thanks to Mary Hatcher, who, as my typist, lived with me all the agony of writing this dissertation. IV . TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii ABSTRACT viii CHAPTER ONE A BRIEF SURVEY OF THE HISTORY OF TEXT LINGUISTICS 1 Notes 27 TWO ON THE DATA AND PALESTINIAN ARABIC 28 2.1 Data 28 2.2 The Nature of Nablus Palestinian Arabic 31 2.3 Note on Diglossia in Arabic 31 2.4 The Phonemic Inventory of the Nablus Palestinian Arabic Dialect .. 34 Notes 3 6 THREE THE SENTENCE APPROACH TO THE TEXT 38 3.1 Theoretical Orientation 38 3.2 The Prague School Analyses 41 3.2.1 F DaneS 42 3.2.2 J Firbas 47 3.2.3 M. Halliday 50 3.3 American Linguists 53 3.3.1 W. Chafe 54 3.3.2 S. Kuno 59 v 3.4 The Arab Grammarians 65 3.5 Conclusion 70 Notes 75 FOUR THE TEXT-APPROACH TO THE THEME: A SAMPLE TEXT 78 4.1 Introduction 78 4.1.1 P . Hopper 85 4.2 The TM: A Sample . 87 4.2.1 Text A 88 4.2.2 Translation 91 4.3 A Frequency Count of the Verbs of Text A 93 4.4 Procedure of Analysis 95 4.5 Problems Encountered 97 4.6 Cohesion of the TM 100 4.7 The Noncohesion of the NTM 113 4 . 8 Summary 113 Notes 115 FIVE THE CONSTITUENTS OF THE TM: THE VERB 117 5.1 Introduction 117 5.1.1 Arab Grammarians and Arabists ... 117 5.2 The Perfect and Imperfect in PA 125 5.2.1 The Perfect of the TM and the Perfect of the NTM 139 5.2.2 The Perfect Verb and the Condition of Assertion 154 5.2.3 The Imperfective of the TM and the Imperfective of the NTM .... 169 Notes 181 vi SIX THE PERFECT, THE IMPERFECT AND WORD ORDER 183 6.1 The Deleted Noun Phrase 186 6.2 VS Word Order 187 6.3.1 6.3 SV Word Order 188 SV Word Order--Contras t t 192 Notes 198 SEVEN CONCLUSION AND THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS 199 7 . 1 Conclusion 199 7.2 Theoretical Implications 201 APPENDIX 204 BIBLIOGRAPHY 230 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 243 vii Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate Council of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy THEME AND THE FUNCTION OF THE VERB IN PALESTINIAN ARABIC NARRATIVE DISCOURSE By Ilham Nayef Abu-Ghazaleh December 1983 Chairman: Chauncey C. Chu Major Department: Linguistics Sentence versus text, written versus oral discourse, and theme as noun versus theme as verb have been matters of con- troversy in the field of language study since its initia- tion. More recently, however, these issues have started to be of more serious concern for linguists. Chapter one is a review of the history and precepts of text linguistics, with reference to the above matters of con- cern when relevant to the school of analysis, or the analyst him/her self. My intention in this research was to investigate theme in Palestinian narrative discourse. I made the choice to apply the analysis to oral unplanned discourse, not planned written discourse. Chapter two is an indication of the sources of my data and the characteristics of the Palestinian dialect spoken by the people I chose. Chapter three is an application of the sentence approach to text. This approach coincides with the theme as a noun approach. The analysis, however, did not prove productive. So, I had to analyze theme as the verb. Chapter four is an application of the verb as theme in narrative discourse. The analysis shows that the perfect verb is the nuclear constituent in a discourse answering the question "what happened?". Applied to a sample text, the perfect verb clauses prove capable of rendering a minimal generalization (or precis) of that text. But not all per- fect verbs proved functional in such procedure. Chapter five is an analysis of the verb in Palestinian Arabic. The analysis aims at finding out the reasons behind the discrep- ancy in the behavior of the verb and the characteristics the perfect verb must have in order for it to express the theme of the text. Chapter six investigates word order and its pragmatic function in conveying the theme of dicsourse. Chapter seven gives the conclusion and theoretical implications of the research CHAPTER ONE A BRIEF SURVEY OF THE HISTORY OF TEXT LINGUISTICS There has been a trend towards text linguistics in the field of linguistic science in the last decade (see Petofi, 1979; Dressier, 1978; van Dijk & Petofi, 1977). Differing from previous orientations towards studying the text, this new approach is a multidisciplinary science. Researchers from within the field of linguistics and from other fields (cognitive psychology, sociology, philosophy, computer sci- ence, etc.) started to see the relevance of linguistics to their fields. The call was for more orientation towards approaching language as a tool for communication (Parret, 197*0. The reasons that led some linguists of the past dec- ade or so to emphasize constructing communicative theories can be generalized as follows. 1. The sentence-oriented grammars of the structuralist and generative approaches of the fifties and sixties of this century proved dissatisfying to those linguists. Problems emerged that these theories could not solve, such as inter- sentential relations (e.g., anaphoric connections between sentences), as well as problems essential to linguistic com- munication (e.g., presupposition) (Kuno, 1978; Beaugrande, 1980a, 1980b; van Dijk, 1972). This failure motivated some linguists to ask whether linguistics until then had been 1 . 2 operating with too restricted a model of language, relying as it did on a model which defined language as a system of simple signs and the speaker as an abstract automaton. This dissatisfaction could be seen in the generati vis ts * efforts to break through (generative semantics, case grammar, ex- tended standard theory, etc.). But most of these efforts were done basically as revisions of Chomsky's theory, which was the real object of investigation, language being merely a tool to prove/disprove the theory. 2. The fact that linguists concentrated their investi- gations on phonological, syntactic and syntactic-semantic analysis proved the view that generative linguistics was based on a reductionist fallacy. Works of philosophers like Searle (1969), psychologists like Vygotsky (1962) and many others (Beaugrande, 1980a; Hopper, 1977, 1979; Petofi, 1979) showed that language should be seen as a form of social interaction. 3. The increasing interest in the political implications of scientific research has led some linguists to pose the question of how to define the relation of linguistics to so- cial reality, and how to justify its aims of research (see Parret, 1974 ) A. The new approach to language as a form of social interaction encouraged empirical research in spoken everyday language, its rules, conventions, and special features (see Labov, 1967, 1972). Such "performance" manifestations as hesitation, repetition and pause, which were long ignored, started to attract linguists' attention, and proved the 3 indispensability of such manifestations to the language-for- communication researcher (see Ochs, 1979; Schegloff, 1978; Levy, 1979).