Documenting the Discourse Particle ʔaðʕaahir in Najdi Arabic

This paper discusses the Najdi Arabic discourse particle ʔaðʕaahir (roughly: 'evidently', 'obviously', 'clearly') as an evidential marker. The primary goal of this paper is to provide a descriptively adequate account of this particle in Najdi Arabic. The paper first discusses the particle ʔaðʕaahir from a semantic point of view, showing that it does not contribute directly to the propositional content of an utterance since it does not provide an additional meaning. Rather, the presence of ʔaðʕaahir pragmatically provides a certain degree of epistemic certainty about the propositional content of the clause in which it occurs, thus expressing the speaker's certainty in relation to the utterance. Since ʔaðʕaahir has not been investigated before and deserves to be given special recognition by means of a proper description, the paper provides a theory-neutral syntactic analysis of this particle. The paper discusses several syntactic facts and observations regarding the syntactic position of ʔaðʕaahir within the clause, casting doubt on the view that it occupies a position in the verbal domain. It also discusses the observable distributional restrictions on the use of ʔaðʕaahir with regard to the complementizer ʔinn both in main and embedded clauses, supporting the assumption that ʔaðʕaahir must be located in a higher position syntactically.