This study started with the premise that language use necessarily interacts with contextual factors. It focused on attitude datives (ADs) in Levantine Arabic as interpersonal pragmatic markers and analyzed them from this perspective. Pragmatists, especially those who work within the Continental school of pragmatics and who emphasize ‘the functional perspective on language behavior’ (LoCastro 2012: 7), consider this premise a universal in that it applies to any language used in human communication. However, as Attardo (1998: 634) maintains, ‘it should be observed that the existence of universals of language, be it at the phonetic or at the pragmatic level, is an empirical issue, not one that can be solved by one's philosophy.’ The question of what contextual factors (for example, identities of social actors, activity type) are most relevant for the sociopragmatic analysis of ADs, as well as the question of how they are relevant, ‘is not given a priori,’ as Verhagen (2010: 48) puts it, ‘and thus requires empirical investigation.’ This study has intended to do just that, approaching ADs from an empirical perspective and analyzing them in their local contexts. This approach aligns with Aijmer and Anderson (2012: 1), who hold that the main purpose of sociopragmatics is to account for the instantiation of pragmatic markers like the ADs examined here, as well as other pragmatic phenomena, ‘in empirical socio-cultural contexts and to present cultural, social and situational differences in their manifestation.’

The previous chapters have examined four types of AD: topic/affectee-oriented or TOP/AFF-ADs, speaker-oriented or SP-ADs, hearer-oriented or HR-ADs, and subject-oriented or SUBJ-ADs. These ADs may be added to utterances by cliticizing to verbal elements. They do not alter the truth conditions of these utterances. Rather, they function as attitudinal and/or relational interpersonal pragmatic markers that instruct the hearer to view the at-issue content of an utterance from the perspective identified by the speaker. As such, they serve as perspectivizers, allowing the speaker to transform the at-issue content of an utterance into a perspectivized thought. Each type of AD offers a different perspective.

The use of these ADs, this study has shown, interacts with elements of an utterance's context. Context may be divided into three types:

• the co-textual context, which includes the type of speech act an AD is embedded in, along with other linguistic and non-linguistic contextualization cues