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Part of
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXXIII: Papers selected from the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, Toronto, Canada, 2019
Edited by Abdel-Khalig Ali and Atiqa Hachimi
[Studies in Arabic Linguistics 11] 2022
► pp. 51–74

Variability of nominal genitives in Casablanca Moroccan Arabic

| University of Toronto

This paper uses sociolinguistic variationist methods to quantitatively analyze patterns of nominal genitive usage in natural speech data from Casablanca Moroccan Arabic. The two variants of nominal genitives, the analytic genitive (involving a genitive exponent /dja:l/ or /d/) and the synthetic genitive (or construct state) are examined using multivariate analysis. Results show that the synthetic genitive is highly correlated with inalienable possession, as previous literature claims. The analytic is predominant overall when the possessor is a lexical noun, partly supporting claims that Moroccan Arabic uses it the most, but the synthetic is still dominant with pronoun possessors.

Keywords: language variation and change, Moroccan Arabic, genitives, possession, quantitative methods
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous literature
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Data
    • 3.2Variable context
    • 3.3Factor groups
      • 3.3.1Inalienable possession
      • 3.3.2Length of NP constituents
      • 3.3.3Lexical origin of nouns (French or Arabic)
      • 3.3.4Grammatical person/number of pronoun possessor
    • 3.4Tools for quantitative analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Results for noun possessors
    • 4.2Results for pronoun possessors
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 December 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sal.11.03pra
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