A grammar of Hadari Arabic: a contrastive-typological perspective

This thesis provides a synchronic morphosyntactic description of the Hadari dialect, a variety of Gulf Arabic spoken in Kuwait, and presents a current documentation of this rapidly changing, under documented spoken dialect of Arabic. The description covers the basic morphology and syntax of Hadari, focusing mainly on the syntax. The description refers to Modern Standard Arabic both as a point of comparison and a point of reference when describing the spoken dialect’s morphology and syntax. The study also draws on discussion of existing descriptions of the dialect and reflects upon their current adequacy. This thesis adopts a typological approach to describing the Hadari dialect, making reference both to Greenbergian typology and to modern typological theory. Two of the main typological theories applied in this description include an application of Matthew Dryer’s exceptionless properties of V-initial languages (1990) and of the Branching Direction Theory (Dryer1992), to the spoken dialect. Furthermore, the study sheds light on the similarities and differences between Modern Standard Arabic and Hadari, regarding the expression of various syntactic aspects. One of the more significant contributions in this section is the typological description of the relative clause in Hadari. Furthermore, the thesis provides descriptions of clause structure, word order, modality, valency, copular clauses, interrogatives, negation, and subordination, in Hadari. The analysis is based on empirical data from recordings of everyday interactions in uncontrolled environment, television shows, radio broadcasts, and personal interviews.