Volume 65, Issue 4 -

This article deals with the linguistic setting of Moroccan Arabic and its varieties. Besides information on the social and historical background, it outlines the most salient typological features of Moroccan Arabic and contrasts them with Moroccan Berber. This article also describes typical features of Moroccan Arabic in the light of other varieties of Arabic.

The aim of this article, based on the results of a survey conducted in Morocco, is to show that the “new speakers”, caught in the conflict between tolerance to variation and use of preferred forms, are also gatekeepers of further language development towards a Moroccan Koiné.

In this article, Berber-Arabic code-switching is studied in a corpus of informal conversations recorded between 1990 and 2010 in Imouzzar in the Middle Atlas (Morocco). Among native speakers of Berber, Moroccan Arabic is the language used in the public domain, while Berber is used at home. It is shown that Berber-Moroccan Arabic code-switching is relatively rare in these conversations. Intersentential code-switching can mostly be explained from specific events in the conversation. Intrasentential insertion of Berber materials into Arabic discourse is extremely rare. The inverse is much more common, but here Standard Arabic seems to play a more important role than Moroccan Arabic, with the exception of adverbs and adverbial expressions.

This article examines the discursive and grammatical functions in Moroccan Arabic of some frequently used expressions that contain the word ‘God’. Most of them are rooted in Classical Arabic but have undergone significant phonological and semantic developments. Some of them have become grammaticalised and appear in linguistic constructions remote from their original meanings.

The paper defines a category of enunciatives as formal elements in a language that bind the interpretation of utterances to the discourse constellation in which they are uttered. A set of candidates for such enunciatives in MA is analysed, showing the grammaticalization of at least one of them ( ᵲa.h ). The analysis is based on a corpus of spontaneous spoken language in Morocco.

This paper presents a study of certain modal particles in Moroccan and Egyptian Arabic that can be classified as enunciatives as suggested by MAAS (same volume). It is argued that these particles fulfil the double function of signifying modality and marking information structure at the same time. It has long been noted that other types of discourse particles ( even, also, only ) also associate with focus (JACOBS 1983; inter alia). The case of Arabic shows that modal particles also show a high degree of focus sensitivity, as their modal functions (announcing, exclaiming, objecting etc.) are intrinsically tied to focus.

This paper is a case study in the exploration of the semantic range of single a high-frequency lexical item on the basis of a corpus of spoken language, in this case Moroccan Arabic. Generalised action verbs (‘do’ verbs) are an interesting object of study because cross-linguistically, they can exhibit a wide range of functions including that of causative verb, verb of creation, verb in agentive collocations, verbaliser with loan words and mimetic expressions, quotative verb, and even a copula-like use with property predicates (Schultze-Berndt 2008). Against this typological background, the range of functions of Moroccan Arabic dar ‘do’ is investigated.