A case study of the features and functions of the Syrian discourse marker <i>lak</i>

Abstract This article presents the first small-scale corpus- and questionnaire-based case study of the Syrian Arabic lak . We investigate the nature of lak as a discourse marker as well as its specific functions by analysing corpus data and referring to previous studies on discourse markers. Our corpus data derives from two sources: the Syrian TV series əl-fuṣūl əl-ʔarbəʕa (‘The Four Seasons’) and the Syrian podcast əl-žah ə baḏ (‘The Connoisseur’). The questionnaire designed for this study was conducted with three native speakers of Syrian Arabic and provides the basis for a native speakers’ perception of the functions and characteristics of lak and thus provides information complementary to that gathered via literature review and corpus analysis. Comparison of our corpus data with previous studies on discourse markers in Arabic and in other languages shows that lak fulfils the criteria for being defined as a discourse marker and shares many commonly occurring discourse marker functions, such as marking boundaries in discourse, expressing attitudes, or signalling emotional involvement of any kind. The paper also briefly discusses possible origins and cognate forms of lak and elaborates various syntactic characteristics of lak , such as its main collocations and in which sentence types it appears most in our data.