Arabic-L:LING:Query on 'now' in Arabic

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Mon 19 May 2014
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject: Query on 'now' in Arabic

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1)
Date: 19 May 2014
From: Dil Parkinson <dil at byu.edu>
Subject: Query on 'now' in Arabic

All languages have discourse level markers that instead of signaling some
overt content signal how utterances are to be understood in the current
discourse.

‘Now’ is one such marker in English.  It can be used adverbially, normally
with stress, in which case it is simply a content word referring to the
present time, but it can also be used as a marker, typically unstressed, to
signal something about how the next utterance is to be understood (see
Schourup, Lawrence. “The discourse marker now: A relevance-theoretic
approach”. Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) pp. 2110-2129.)

Examples from English (taken from the above mentioned paper) include:

1- Now, about “The Love Song of Alfred J Profrock”, what is that poem about
di you think?
2- Now, let me think.
3- People in housing estates are living on the charity of their neighbors,
and whether they like it or not they can’t help it. Now, I do not agree
with evicting these people.

There are various linguistic characterizations of ‘now’ as a marker.
Schourup characterizes it as an instruction to:

“process the utterance in a context that is in part significantly
(‘noteworthily’) new with respect to assumptions already highly accessible”

i.e.it alerts the hearer to something new in the context that will need to
be taken into consideration in order to interpret the utterance correctly.

My question is two-fold:

1. Is the Arabic word الآن ever used in a like manner, where the ‘at this
time’ meaning is backgrounded or totally abandoned and the interpretation
is procedural or discourse-pragmatic?  Can you give me some clear examples
of such use?

2. If the word الآن is not used in this manner, are there discourse markers
in Arabic that are somehow more or less equivalent to ‘now’ in English?

Thanks you in advance for any insight you can provide!

dil parkinson

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