Grammaticalization of the verb qāl ‘to say’ in the Arabic dialect of Deir Ezzour

In this article I examine several patterns of grammaticalization of the verb qāl in the Arabic dialect of Deir Ezzour in eastern Syria. qāl is grammaticalized into grammemes expressing different grammatical categories: Epistemic modality, Evidentiality, Skepticism, Deontic obligation, Hortative modality, Preferentiality, Similative constructions, and Polar questions. While there have been previous studies on the grammaticalization of the verb qāl in other varieties of Arabic, no other variety shows such extensive use of the verb qāl in grammaticalization and is therefore of interest from a typological and comparative point of view. The mechanisms involved in grammaticalization in this dialect are by and large consistent with those found in other languages (cf. Kuteva et al., 2019Kuteva, Tania, Heine, Bernd, Hóng, Bo, Long, Haiping, Narrog, Heiko, & Rhee, Seongha. (2019). World lexicon of grammaticalization. Cambridge University Press. ).