A Syntactic and Pragmatic Analysis of the Colloquial Expression ʔinno ‘That’ in Jordanian Arabic: Evidence from Social Media Conversation

This study investigates the colloquial expression ʔinno that serves as a complementizer (C) and a discourse marker (DM) in Jordanian Arabic (JA). The data includes (422) instances of ʔinno collected from social media conversations of (60) JA speakers. The analysis shows that for ʔinno as a (C), there are (259) instances that are used to introduce subordinate clauses, and it is inflected with pronoun suffixes that specify person, gender, and number. It also serves various functions in verbal and nominal sentences. As a DM, Ɂinno are (163) instances that appear in the middle of sentences between two propositions. A list of contexts is developed featuring Ɂinno in JA. The pragmatic functions of Ɂinno are determined in each situation and validated by an Acceptability Judgment Task which is completed by 20 native speakers of JA. The pragmatic functions of ʔinno fall into six primary categories with sub-functions, such as explanatory functions (like giving reasons or expressing results), elaborative functions (including elaboration and giving examples and clarification), emotional and assessment functions (such as expressing surprise or criticism), emphatic and assertive functions (for emphasizing or warning), epistemic and uncertainty functions (covering hesitation and hedging), and a turn-taking function (specifically urging for continuity). This study concludes that Ɂinno is well established among social media users in the Jordanian context and the varied contexts play a vital role in exploring its pragmatic and syntactic functions.