Bahi-as-a -Discourse -Marker-in-Daily -Libyan-Arabic

Khadeja 4‘bahi’ is a multi-functional discourse marker that conveys different meanings. As statedby Lewis, 2006, there are three aspects suggested with reference to the relation between eachmarker’s various meanings and the semantic values that are represented in the lexicon; thehomonymy aspect, the pragmatic aspect, and the polysemy aspect. This applies to ‘bahi’ as welland will be reflected in the data analyzed below.In this paper, the uses of ‘bahi’ will be analyzed based on two types of collected data;videos recorded at The Faculty of Arts, Sebha University, Libya 2008, showing pairs ofstudents sharing a discussion over a task given to them and using ‘bahi’ as a linguistic marker.The other is a collection of written Libyan conversations made over the phone and in person.Each data will be transcribed in the form of extracts followed by analysis of how ‘bahi’was utilized within the context and if there are any other related phenomena associated with‘bahi’.II.Data Analysis:Part I. Video Recorded Data:The data collected was recorded at the faculty of Arts, Sebha University, 2008 in aworkshop under the supervision of the International Association of Pragmatics. Studentscontributing in this data were a mix of undergraduates pursuing their BA in English Language.Each pair of students was given a random set of story sequences to rearrange and talk about asthey work. For the purpose of this paper, only the utterances where ‘bahi’ was used are the onesrelevant to the study, and hence were shared here. The three following extracts written in Arabicwith translation reflect various contextual meanings of the word:Extract 1. (First line in Arabic is the actual utterance, the second, in English, is the meaning)هذه الأولى،‏ اول وحدة،‏ التانية..أهي ا .aThe first one, First one, the second. Here it is