Topic Management and Evaluative Discourse in Spoken Jordanian Arabic: Evidence from Natural Conversations

Abstract

This article examines how speakers of Jordanian Arabic manage topic continuity, topic shift, stance, and evaluation in naturally occurring spoken discourse. This study focused mainly on word order and focus marking, the present paper gives special attention to topic management and evaluative discourse. The analysis is based on a corpus of Jordanian Arabic data consisting of naturalistic conversations, semi-structured interviews, and written dialectal texts, with particular emphasis on the conversational extracts. This study argues that topic management in spoken Jordanian Arabic is not achieved only through grammatical subject position. It is also achieved through demonstratives, left-dislocated topics, null subjects, discourse markers, repetition, elliptical structures, and evaluative predicates. The findings show that speakers commonly place known or socially salient referents in clause-initial position, then attach comments, judgments, complaints, or emotional evaluations to them. In institutional, family, emotional, religious, educational, and digital contexts, evaluation is often collaboratively built across turns. The paper concludes that spoken Jordanian Arabic is a discourse-sensitive system in which grammar, interaction, and social meaning work together to organize conversation.