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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 33:4 (2023) ► pp.532–558

Intergenerational interviews in Negev Arabic

Negotiating lexical, discursive and cultural gaps

ORCID logo | Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Communication strategies used for conversational repair in Negev Arabic are examined here in a 170,000-word corpus of intergenerational interviews, with university students interviewing their relatives, over age 55, in the Bedouin community in the Negev, southern Israel. Since the traditional language and narrative style of the elderly are largely unfamiliar to the young generation in terms of lexicon, discourse structure and cultural norms, progressivity was often interrupted for purpose of repair. Other-initiated self-repair sequences were particularly frequent: the student asks a metalinguistic or referent-tracking question, or inquires about past customs, and the interviewee explains; additional turns may contain candidate understanding moves and confirmation, before resuming progressivity of the narrative sequence. Gaps were sometimes mediated by a middle-generation ‘broker’ interlocutor. Conversational repair was found to be frequent in facilitating both intelligibility and comprehensibility in these intergenerational conversations.

Keywords: intergenerational interviews, communication strategies, conversational repair, Negev Arabic, lexical gaps, other-initiated repair, metalinguistic questions, candidate understanding, participant (referent-)tracking, negotiation of meaning
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Arabic in Israel
    • 1.2The Bedouin Negev – Linguistic history and varieties
      • 1.2.1Traditional Negev Arabic
      • 1.2.2Young Negev Arabic
      • 1.2.3Flexibility of age group definitions and boundaries
    • 1.3Conceptual framework
  • 2.Present study
  • 3.Lexical repair
    • 3.1Metalinguistic questions
      • Extract (2) The Bedouin and the mare
      • Extract (3) Free will?
      • Extracts (4)–(5) Drinking regimes
    • 3.2Metalinguistic candidate understanding questions
    • 3.3Rare breakdowns
      • Extract (6) Pregnant but different
  • 4.Discursive gaps
    • 4.1Participant tracking
      • Extract (7) Allied ambush
      • Extract (8) But who drove you out?
    • 4.2Tense use
      • Extract (9) Today? Long ago?
      • Extract (10) You didn’t use to pray?!
  • 5.Cultural gaps
    • Extract (11) In the same tent??
  • 6.Summary and what next
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 January 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.20051.hen
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