Idioms in Syrian Arabic: a semantic and grammatical approach to the verb

Abstract This contribution deals with idioms in vernacular Syrian Arabic, focusing on the verbal component, as well as their semantic and grammatical particularities. The corpus of 151 idioms is extracted from seven popular TV series, 91 of these are presented in the paper along with a literal and idiomatic translation. The idiomatic meaning of the most frequently attested verbs is discussed first. This is followed by a grammatical discussion regarding word order, verbal inflection, morphological variation and lexical variation. The paper demonstrates the scarcity of idioms in some of the most important sources of Syrian Arabic. It further reveals grammatical parallels with idioms in other Arabic varieties, as well as in Western languages. The findings provide the field with new data, and will lead to a better understanding of both Arabic idioms in general, and Syrian Arabic in particular.