The Discourse Marker wa in Standard Arabic—A Syntactic and Semantic Analysis

Abstract

Discourse markers are items (such as and, so, anyway, but, on the other hand, however) that link spans of discourse and signal various semantic and pragmatic relations.Thus, they play an important role in the cohesiveness, organization and interpretation of discourse.1 Arabic has a number of devices which play a pivotal role in the cohesion and coherence of written and spoken discourse such as wa, aw, lakin, am, fa, thuma, bal, la, etc.The present paper is limited in scope.It is an attempt to establish the constituency and identify the functions of the Arabic discourse connective device wa using resources of syntax, semantics and pragmatics.Such resources include descriptive and analytical diagnostic tools of constituency tests, structural ambiguity and semantic roles.

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