Discourse Markers of Causality in Maghrebi and Egyptian Dialects: A Socio-Pragmatic Perspective

Abstract Discourse markers in this paper are examined from a relevance theoretic perspective which highlights their contribution to the process of inference and are considered elements that encode procedural meaning. A total of 24 participants from three Arabic speaking countries: Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt took part in the study. The data used for the study was elicited through two tasks: informal multi-party conversation and structured interviews. The results show how the meaning of causality as a pragmatic variable (Schneider & Barron 2008; Terkourafi 2011) is realized by means of different pragmatic variants. Using a Relevance Theoretic framework (Sperber & Wilson 1986, 1995; Blakemore, 1987), this paper argues that DMs signal pragmatic inferences that are performed by the addressee. The choice of variants is found to be shaped by broad social categories as well as socio-psychological choices made by the individual (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller 1985).