Adverbial subordinators in Juba Arabic

International audience Adverbial subordinators are free or bound morphemes that specify some circumstantial relation between the subordinate clause over which they operates and the modified matrix clause (Kortmann, 1996). In this paper I deal with the issue of the grammaticalization of adverbial subordinators in Juba Arabic, an under-described Arabic-based pidgincreole (i.e. expanded pidgin) serving as the major vehicular language of the Republic of South Sudan (Manfredi & Petrollino, 2013; Manfredi, forthcoming). In more detail, this paper aims at reveling the relationship between the semantic types of a number of adverbial clauses and their different expression formats as well as to find out whether this correlation can be linked to the general system of subordination and/or complementation of Juba Arabic (Cristofaro, 2003; Nordström, 2010). The paper is organized in two parts. In the first parts, I provide a synchronic overview of the expression formats of purpose, result, concessive conditional and temporal subordinate clauses. In the second part, I discuss the sources for the grammaticalization of the corresponding adverbial subordinators (i.e. adverbs, verbs, interjections) by enlightening the possible semantic factors underlying their functional specialization. The analysis of adverbial clauses and subordinators is based on a spontaneous speech corpus transcribed and annotated in ELAN (Manfredi, 2012) as well as on elicited data gathered from Juba Arabic native speakers. Adopting a functional-typological perspective, the study finally tries to explain the main features of adverbial subordination in Juba Arabic by fitting it into the broader study of complexsyntax in pidgin and creole languages.