The Textual Functions of Discourse Marker yalla in Jordanian Arabic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present study aims at proving that yalla ‘hurry’ is a discourse marker in Jordanian Spoken Arabic (henceforth, JSA). It also investigates the textual functions of yalla in different contexts. The data consisted of 104 scenarios, including the JSA yalla. The researchers relied mainly on observation to collect the data needed for the present study. A panel of four raters, who were four professors of linguistics, tested the validity of the data. Moreover, a group of 50 students studying English at Al Balqa Applied University tested the data based on acceptability judgment. The findings showed that yalla is a discourse marker as it holds the common features of DMs, such as connectivity, optionality, non-truth-conditionality, weak clause association, orality, initiality, multi-categoriality, and multifunctionality. In addition, the findings revealed that the DM yalla serves five main discourse functions, namely: indicating the end of a conversation, signaling a topic shift, initiating a topic, taking a turn, and yielding a turn.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".