Using quantitative, traditional variationist sociolinguistic methods, this study examines the social and linguistic distribution of the interchangeable Syrian Arabic discourse markers yaʕni and ʔinnu: ‘I mean’ in the speech of 72 speakers from the village Oyoun Al-Wadi in Syria. Children and adult data are compared. Age and gender among four groups of children and gender among adults are examined to see if there is a change in progress towards the use of the innovative form ʔinnu:. Children show a reverse pattern, generally using more ʔinnu: than adults. Women use more ʔinnu: than men, and boys use more ʔinnu: than girls. The gender disparity emerged as statistically significant among adults but not among children. While the difference between the older and younger generation indicates a shift towards higher use of ʔinnu:, the undulating pattern among the four age groups indicate age-grading and the conflicting gender differences rules out a change in progress. Regardless of gender, the linguistic distribution favors ʔinnu: in medial position and yaʕni in initial position, although yaʕni shows more variability in its syntactic position, proposing that higher association with specific pragmatic functions leads to higher occurrence in specific syntactic positions through interdependence between the syntactic and pragmatic.

这项研究使用定量的传统变异主义社会语言学方法，考察了可互换的叙利亚阿拉伯语话语标记yaʕni和nuinnu的社会和语言分布：来自叙利亚Oyoun Al-Wadi村的72位演讲者的讲话中的“我的意思是”。比较儿童和成人数据。检查了四组儿童的年龄和性别以及成年人的性别，以查看使用创新形式ʔinnu的过程是否有所变化。儿童表现出相反的模式，通常比成人使用更多的ʔ。女性使用更多ʔinnu：比男人和男孩使用更多ʔinnu：比女孩。性别差异在成年人中表现出统计学上的显着性，但在儿童中却没有。老一辈和年轻一代之间的差异表明人们越来越倾向于使用“ innu：”，但四个年龄组之间的起伏格局表明年龄分级，而相互矛盾的性别差异则排除了进展的变化。无论性别如何，语言分布都偏爱ʔinnu：在中间位置而yaʕni在初始位置，尽管yaʕni在其句法位置上表现出更多的可变性，这表明与特定语用功能的较高关联会通过句法之间的相互依赖性而导致在特定句法位置上更高的发生率。务实。