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Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages: Online-First Articles

What can the stories of a frog tell us about motion event description in Gulf Pidgin Arabic?

| Emirates Schools Establishment

Motion event description has received little attention in contact linguistics as compared to other branches of linguistics. To address this gap, I provide an overview of the grammatical and lexical resources for the encoding of motion events in Gulf Pidgin Arabic (GPA). 10 GPA speakers narrated the story of a boy, his dog, and his missing pet frog. The results revealed: (a) the participants used a relatively large number of path verbs and a comprehensive number of spatial particles; (b) they showed an overwhelming aversion to the description of manner in boundary-crossing and caused motion situations; and (c) they engineered coercive constructions to deal with semantically complex situations. Taken together, the linguistic evidence suggests GPA is developing into a verb-framed language type. This study adds a significant methodological and empirical weight to the existing literature and has the potential to encourage intra- and inter-disciplinary comparative work on motion event description.

Keywords: Gulf, pidgin, Arabic, motion, event, manner, path
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Theoretical framework
    • 3.2Analytical framework
    • 3.3Procedure
    • 3.4Hypotheses
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Motion verbs
    • 4.2The distribution and frequency of spatial particles
    • 4.3The description of Boundary-crossing and manner of motion
    • 4.4The expression of caused motion
      • 4.4.1The xalli construction
    • 4.5Motion verbs and the expression of aspect
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1The lexicalization of motion in GPA as compared to JA
    • 5.2Is GPA developing into a V-framed language?
  • 6.Conclusion, limitations, and guidance for future research
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 October 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.00122.lou
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