Word Order Variation and Focus Marking in Jordanian Arabic: A Syntax–Pragmatics Interface Study

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between word order variation and focus marking in Jordanian Arabic (JA) from the perspective of the syntax-pragmatics interface. Drawing on a corpus of naturalistic conversations, semi-structured interviews, and written dialectal texts, the study investigates how JA speakers exploit subject-initial, verb-initial, fronted, dislocated, interrogative, and elliptical constructions to organize information and foreground salient discourse material. The analysis shows that JA word order is flexible but patterned: SVO clauses most frequently support topic-comment organization, verb-initial clauses foreground events or changes of state, left dislocation and topicalization activate or re-activate referents, and wh-fronting, contrastive particles, negation, repetition, and evaluative predicates mark several types of focus. Quantitative distributional evidence from 4,090 coded clauses supports the qualitative finding that word order choices are not merely grammatical alternatives but discourse-sensitive strategies. This study argues that focus marking in JA is multi-cued: it emerges through the interaction of constituent order, discourse particles, recoverable subjects, clitic resumption, and contextual contrast. These findings contribute to Arabic dialectology, information-structure theory, and applied work in translation, language teaching, and Arabic natural language processing. The theoretical framing is grounded in information-structure theory and cartographic approaches to the left periphery (Lambrecht, 1994; Rizzi, 1997), while the interpretation of JA word order follows previous work on Arabic dialectal syntax and information structure (Benmamoun, 2000; Jarrah, 2019).