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Article published In:
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages
Vol. 37:1 (2022) ► pp.53–71

Marking statements of fact in early pidgins

| University of Nijmegen , The Netherlands

The particle fi is used in Classical Arabic as a local and temporal preposition, ‘in’. In the contemporary Arabic dialects, it has the same meaning, but in addition it is used in some dialects as an existential, ‘there is/are’. In a number of Arabic work-related pidgins, such as Gulf Pidgin Arabic and Pidgin Madame, fi has acquired new functions. It does not only denote nominal predication, location, and possession, but is also used in combination with verbal forms. Several proposals have been made to explain this use of fī. Avram (2012) regards fī as a progressive aspect marker, while Potsdam & Alanazi (2014) deny the verbal nature of the construction and regard fī as a copula. Bakir (2014) analyzes fī as a marker of verbality of the predicate. The present paper suggests that the general function of fi is to mark the link between topic and focus as assertive rather than modal and looks for parallels of this use in a few other work-related pidgins.

Keywords: Arabic pidgins, copula, existential, factual marker, work-related jargons
Article outline
  • 1.Arabic pidgins and the particle fi
  • 2.Explaining fi
  • 3.Parallels of fi in other pidgins
  • 4.Factual statements in stable pidgins
  • Notes
  • Bibliographical references
Published online: 23 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.00086.ver
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