Ing participle and grounding in English and Arabic media discourse

الملخص EN

The phenomenon of Foregrounding-Backgrounding (FG-BG) tense-aspect markers in media discourse represented by the English -ing Participle and its Arabic equivalents is cross-linguistically investigated.

A syntactic typology of these equivalents in Arabic reveals that Arabic is prolific and versatile in expressing this English marker.

Examining the discourse-semantic features of grounding values of these markers shows that -ing Participle is free to cross semantic boundaries to express different FG-BG values.

In Arabic, the Imperfective is the only form that has this feature.

These markers in both languages can be called Free Grounding Discourse Markers.

The other Arabic equivalent forms are semantically classified as Constrained Grounding Discourse Markers and Semi-Constrained Grounding Discourse Markers.

A discourse-pragmatic analysis of these grounding markers reveals that there is a canonical and non-canonical staging in both languages.

In non-canonical staging, two types have been found; High Upstaging and Mid Upstaging.

Moreover, it has been found that the Main Event can be recursive in both languages.

The absence of the corresponding Arabic markers to the -ing Participle in English explains that these markers are pragmatically driven in both languages.

Three types of tense-aspect markers absence have been identified and classified as Complete Deletion, Partial Deletion and Substitution.

Finally, constraints on the exchangeability of tense-aspect discourse markers in Arabic shows that some of these markers are nonexchangeable and they are termed near-Synonymous Grounding Discourse Markers.

This non-exchangeability poses a challenging problem for English-Arabic journalistic translation