1887
Volume 39, Issue 2
  • ISSN 0920-9034
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9870
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Abstract

Abstract

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.

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2023-10-02
2025-02-17
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): Arabic; event; Gulf; manner; motion; path; pidgin
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