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Part of
Arabic in Contact
Edited by Stefano Manfredi and Mauro Tosco
[Studies in Arabic Linguistics 6] 2018
► pp. 295–312

Determiner phrase

How specific is it in Moroccan Arabic-French codeswitching?

| GRAL, Faculty of letters and human sciences-Meknes, Morocco | LACNAD-Inalco, Paris

Nominal insertions in Moroccan Arabic-French codeswitching are very common. They typically appear as French maximal projections embedded in a larger constituent headed by the Arabic determiners wāḥəd and hād. However, the reasons behind the insertion of determiners have not been clarified. This study, which relies on the Matrix Language Frame model (Myers-Scotton 1993), seeks to elucidate the factors inducing the insertion of determiners in the morphosyntactic and semantic frame of Moroccan Arabic. Analyzing eleven hours of recorded data, we will show that on the morphosyntactic level, the mismatch between Moroccan Arabic and French definiteness, gender and number may explain the frequency of such insertions. Though, morphosyntactic structure is not the only factor at play in contexts where determination is complex in both languages, and we thus need to take into account other domains such as the semantic, pragmatic and enunciative ones.

Keywords: determiner phrase, Moroccan Arabic-French codeswitching, Moroccan Arabic, French, language contact, determiners, nominal insertion, MLF model
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Informants and data
  • 3.The theoretical background: The MLF model
  • 4.Nominal insertion in Moroccan Arabic-French codeswitching
    • 4.1Mixed constituents
    • 4.2Internal EL islands
    • 4.3EL islands
  • 5.Bilingual DP: how specific is it in Moroccan Arabic-French contact?
  • 6.Why do French determiners appear after wāḥəd or hād?
  • 7.Determiner phrase in Moroccan Arabic and French: A possible comparison
  • 8.DP in Moroccan Arabic-French codeswitching: The indefinite wāhəd əl-
  • 9.Demonstratives
  • 10.Conclusion
  • Abbreviations
  • Note
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 10 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sal.6.15zia
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