Grammaticalization of discourse markers: views from Jordanian Arabic

The inclusion of discourse markers (DMs), which are commonly depicted as syntactically non-integrated elements, within the domain of grammaticalization has been a controversial topic in the last two decades. The emergence of DMs for some researchers are cases of grammaticalization, whereas they are viewed by some other researchers as elements that escape from the grammatical domain to the pragmatic and communicative domain. This paper argues with the grammaticalization of DMs. It provides evidence to this view from Jordanian Arabic. The cases under investigation in this paper are the DMs ma, hu and mahu. This paper offers synchronic evidence supporting their grammaticalization. This evidence is based on two main conclusions: (1) these DMs share common grammatical items most of the grammaticalization sub-processes that lead to their emergence, and (2) they are not dis-integrated elements from the sentence grammar. They rather belong to the peripheral domain of grammar.