Abstract
In Moroccan Arabic, like in many other Afroasiatic languages, certain nouns may have more than one plural form. For instance, t ʕ es ʕ wera ‘photo’ has plurals t ʕ s ʕ awer and t ʕ s ʕ werat. However, their diminutive systematically resorts to -at suffixation in the plural. The aim of this study is twofold. First, it presents an interface approach which aims to determine the structural location of number and capture the empirical contrast between broken and sound plurals. It is argued that the sound plurals are associated with the standard Num projection, whereas the broken plurals are associated lower in the structure with the n projection. Second, it provides a templatic analysis of the diminutive formation, showing that the diminutive and the internal plural markers compete for the same templatic position. External evidence for the analysis is drawn from the phenomenon of emphasis spread. The nP is presented as the maximal domain of emphasis spread in nouns.
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Notes
One might argue that affix ordering in double plurals runs counter the hypothesis put forth here since the suffix -ó, which derives regular plurals, is added before -yáal. Yet these formations differ from the ones at hand in MA since they involve double pluralization. As far as the parallel holds, we can assume that Somali plurals using -ó are generated under nP (see Lecarme 2002: 193), similarly to what we propose for MA internal plurals.
One of the anonymous reviewers rightly pointed out that certain numerals in MA select broken plurals. For instance, tlata ‘three’ can be used with broken plurals, as opposed to ʒuʒ ‘two’ which combines with sound plurals. In fact, these numerals behave differently since they involve distinct syntactic structures.
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(i)
As the careful reader will have noticed, a genitive preposition d intervenes between tlata and the following broken plural but not between ʒuʒ and its sound plural. The complement of the genitive preposition when plural can be only internal, with a collective reading which requires a numeral in order to be quantified. For the sake of completeness, we should also note that the absence of the genitive preposition in (b) leads to a construct state formation where the sound plural t ʕ əs ʕ werat occurs without a determiner, as opposed to the broken plural tt ʕ s ʕ awər whose geminate results from the concatenation of the determiner l- and the stem-initial consonant.
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(i)
One could argue that ʕəd ʕ mat alternates with feminine singular ʕəd ʕ ma whereas masculine ʕd ʕ əm has plural ʕd ʕ am, therefore suggesting that masculine forms select only internal plurals while feminine forms opt for external plurals. This correspondence is, however, far from being systematic as we find plenty of feminine nouns which resort to internal plural formation. Singular forms ending with -a in (4) are actually feminine but they all have internal plurals as well as external ones. The behaviour of feminine nouns clearly shows that gender specification is irrelevant in the choice of the type of plural formation.
In MA, mass nouns are singular just as English water and sugar. This is expressed through their agreement:
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(i)
Their plural, systematically formed by means of -at suffixation, makes them count. This further argues for the fact that sound plurals indicate a definite number.
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(i)
It should be noted here that j-gemination is subject to variation. According to Elmdari (1999: 82), forms like in (4c–e) display a non-geminated glide in the MA variety of Marrakech.
Such prosodic analyses are tenable only at the expense of stipulating that neither ambisyllabic geminates nor word-final consonants contribute to weight. In addition, as Boudlal (2001: 253) noticed, prosodic circumscription fails to account for forms like ʒməl ‘camel’ since the diminutive suffix should be added after the circumscribed syllable məl, leading to ∗ ʒəmli rather than ʒmijjəl. Similar problems arise with biconsonantal bases such as bit ‘room’, in which neither a CV nor a CəC syllable type is available.
The idea of reducing the number of templates in the verbal conjugation of Classical Arabic is not new. McCarthy (1979: 135) has already suggested expressing the regularities that the verbal forms and their canonical patterns show by means of two templates: CV((CV)[+seg])CVC and CCV([+seg])CVC. The first template abbreviates the patterns CVCVC, CVCCVC, CVVCVC, CVCVCCVC and CVCVVCVC. The second abbreviates the patterns CCVCVC, CCVCCVC and CCVVCVC.
It is worth noting that no single semantic feature is associated with the derivational CV: verbs using medial-consonant gemination may be intensive, causative or just transitive, while those with a long vowel are not always reciprocal (e.g. sa:fara ‘he travelled’, d ʕ a:ʕafa ‘he doubled’).
In this respect, it is interesting to note that nouns differ from verbs in that the latter use internal morphology between the first two root consonants, while nouns generally resort to infixation between the last two consonants (e.g. kita:b ‘book’, rima:l ‘sands’)
This phenomenon is not limited to diminutives. It is also found in the plural formation (e.g. ʒili (sg) / ʒilijjat (pl) ‘vest’, biru (sg) / biruwwat (pl) ‘office’). Further examples and discussion is found in Boudlal (2001: 280). It should be noted that in certain varieties of MA, the glide following the diminutive marker surfaces as non-geminated. The reader is referred to Elmdari (1999: 82) about the MA variety of Marrakech.
As stated earlier in Sect. 1, MA does show a few double plurals, such as mwasat ‘knives’ (plural of plural mwas) and qwasat ‘arches’ (plural of plural qwas). This supports our assumption that both nP and numP are the locus of plurality in MA.
Further evidence for the phase-hood character of category-determining projections in MA comes from glide-vowel alternations. Like Berber (see Guerssel 1986; Lahrouchi 2013), MA has many instances of glide-vowel alternations which call for an analysis in terms of phasal derivation. Compare, for instance, xu ‘brother’ to xwatat ‘sisters’. The high vowel in the first form turns into a glide since it is immediately followed by the vowel -a. This alternation is automatic within a single domain, namely nP. However, in certain cases the same vowel remains unchanged as in xu-ja ‘my brother’, while the possessive clitic turns its vowel -i into [j] in order to avoid hiatus. The reason that the high vowel u alternates with the glide w in xu / xwatat but not in xu / xu-ja can easily be explained if we assume that the alternation is automatic within the nP phase. In xu-ja, the segments following /u/, including the possessive clitic -i(a), have no access to the phonological material already spelled-out.
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Lahrouchi, M., Ridouane, R. On diminutives and plurals in Moroccan Arabic. Morphology 26, 453–475 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-016-9290-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-016-9290-7