A variationist approach to NP genitive alternatives in Arabic

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the sociolinguistic variation of Noun Phrase (NP) genitive alternatives in Jordanian Arabic (JA) as spoken in Amman. It attempts to examine the role of certain linguistic factors i.e., animacy, definiteness, alienability, complexity, and grammatical function as well as social factors, i.e., age, gender, education, and region which may constrain the choice of using free state nominals (FSN) or construct state nominals (CS) in JA structure.  Drawing on Labov’s variationist approach (1972), for the current study's objectives, a corpus of spontaneous speech data is created. The corpus includes 32 sociolinguistic interviews of 32 speakers of JA (all reside in Amman). Using GOLDVARB X (Sankoff, Tagliamonte, and Smith, 2005), distributional analysis, multivariate analysis, and cross-tabulation approach are employed to analyze the data. An overall distribution of 1319 tokens indicates that CS is evidently more frequent than FSN in JA. Multivariate analysis is used to ascertain the statistical significance of factor groups. Region and four linguistic factors i.e., alienability, animacy, definiteness, and grammatical function are found to be statistically significant regarding constraining the variant choice. An interpretation of the effect of these factors on the observed linguistic phenomenon is offered.