Pain Constructions in modern Arabic dialects: a typological overview

Abstract Pain Constructions (PCs) constitute a class of experiential constructions expressing situations that involve unpleasant physical experiences (e.g. headache, burning eyes, dizziness, etc.). Previous cross-linguistic comparisons have shown that, though languages do not have dedicated morphosyntactic structures for encoding pain, there are certain constructions that are more likely to express physical experiences. Based on original data elicited by means of a situational questionnaire, this paper aims at analyzing the semantic and syntactic properties of PCs in modern Arabic dialects and to make typological generalizations about their cross-dialect variation. Benefiting from insights from both linguistic typology and contact linguistics, the study eventually shows that, despite considerable lexicosemantic and morphosyntactic variation, PCs in Arabic can be reduced to two main syntactic types: locational and inverse constructions.