Subject-Oriented Attitude Datives in Social Context
Subject-Oriented Attitude Datives in Social Context
The focus of this chapter is on Levantine Arabic attitude datives that take the subject of the construction in which they occur as a referent. The chapter analyzes specific instances of subject-oriented attitude datives as used in different types of social acts. It shows that when a speaker uses these datives in representatives (i.e., statements that may be assessed as true or false), she expresses an evaluative attitude toward an event as either unimportant/trivial or unexpected/surprising, based on her familiarity with the subject of that event and her expectations of that subject. When a speaker uses the same datives in directives (e.g., requests), she evaluates the potential cost of the action required by her utterance as minimal compared to any potential gain. All social functions are contingent on contextual factors, including the sociocultural, situational, and co-textual context.
Keywords: Attitude datives, Levantine Arabic, evaluation, social acts, cost and gain, context
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