A procedural analysis of the Tunisian Arabic discourse connective ʔama

Within the Relevance-based approach, discourse connectives such as but and so are linguistic expressions that encode a procedural meaning (i.e., instructions) which guides the addressee to derive the intended interpretation of a discourse segment (a phrase, a clause, or a sentence) based on context derived from the previous one (Blakemore 87, 1992, 2002; Blass 1990; Sperber and Wilson 1995). This paper uses the Relevance-Theoretic framework to propose a procedural account for the Tunisian Arabic discourse connective Ɂama. The distribution of Ɂama in a data corpus shows that it occurs in different syntactic positions to conjoin two phrases or two clauses; or to introduce a new sentence or even a new utterance. Further, Ɂama signals three different meanings: contrast, denial of expectation, and cancellation. The paper argues that Ɂama is not ambiguous and propose a unitary account for its meaning. I argue that Ɂama encodes one general procedure that instructs the hearer to see an asymmetric relationship between two properties or two propositions. The general procedure that Ɂama encodes constrains the meaning of the discourse segment it introduces by guiding the hearer to derive the specific meaning (i.e, contrast, denial, or cancellation). In doing so, Ɂama constrains only the implicit side of communication without contributing to the truth conditions of the utterance that contains it as shown in examples (1-3).