Conditional Constructions in Damascus Arabic : Form and meaning

Abstract: This paper treats the relationship between form and meaning in conditional constructions in Damascus Arabic (DA). More specifically, it treats two, main formal categories of DA conditional constructions: the conditional marker and the verb morphology and, further, how these are related to various degrees of conditional hypotheticality. Apart from the introductory section (Introduction, Aim, Method and Classification of DA), the paper consists of three larger sections: Section 2 gives a basic, theoretical background of crosslinguistic conditional constructions as well as what previous scholars have said about the crosslinguistic relationship between conditional form and meaning. It is found that many of these scholars tend to describe form, but neglect deeper discussions of meaning. This section also provides a general background of the verbal system in DA and the primary TAM (Tense-Aspect-Mood) categories of DA verb forms. The main analysis of this thesis is found in section 3. In this section, I first suggest a method of analysis called ‘the hypotheticality continuum’ which is then employed in the following sub-sections, following Comrie (1986). Thereafter, attention is first paid to DA protasis markers and how the choice of marker is related to hypotheticality. Thirdly, I deal with verb morphology and how the choice of verb form together with a given protasis marker contributes to creating even more fine-grained distinctions of hypotheticality in DA conditional constructions. Lastly, a presentation of results and final discussion in section 4 conclude the paper.