Relative clauses in Sudanese Arabic

This paper begins with a consideration of the nature of referentiality. A distinction is drawn between objective reference, which exists outside language, and subjective reference, which I argue may be imposed on the world by language. I argue that while agreement is a grammatical phenomenon, as traditionally believed, it has close links with the notion of subjective reference. On the basis of this, I argue that definiteness is a properly referential, and denotative phenomenon. I go on to show that the relative ‘elements’ such as allaḏī and illī which occur in various varieties of Arabic are not pronouns, but rather markers of definiteness, and that al- in Sudanese Arabic can be regarded as a ‘defi-nite particle’. I argue that in Sudanese al- is the head of its phrase, and consider the referentiality of al- in the dialect. I then consider demonstratives as secondary relative clause markers in Sudanese, and non-restrictive relative clauses in the dialect. I finally consider cases in which the al- head of a relative clause is not co-referential with the element (particularly an adjectival element) which follows it. The theoretical analysis provided in this paper is based — somewhat informally — on the linguistic theory of axiomatic functionalism initially developed by J.W.F. Mulder and S.G.J. Hervey (e.g. Mulder 1968, 1989; Mulder and Hervey 1972, 1980; Hervey 1979, 1982), and subsequently extended on the basis of proposals put forward by Michael Lamb in Dickins (1998). In an attempt to keep the main body of the paper as generally comprehensible as possible, I have confined technical comments relating to axiomatic functionalism to footnotes.