An Exception to the Rule? Lone French Nouns in Tunisian Arabic

Reports on language mixing involving Arabic often qualify that language as resistant to constraints operating on other language pairs. But many fail to situate the purported violations with respect to recipient and donor languages, making it impossible to ascertain whether these are exceptional code-switches or (nonce) borrowings; isolated cases or robust patterns. We address these issues through variationist analysis of Tunisian Arabic/French bilingual discourse. Focusing on conflict sites that reveal which grammar is operative when the other language is accessed, we compare quantitatively the behavior of lone French-origin nouns in Arabic with their counterparts in both donor and recipient languages. Despite a higher order community resistance to morphological inflection of other-language items, results show treatment of French nouns to be consistent with the (variable) grammar of Arabic and different from that of French. Applying the same accountable methodology to the contentious French det+n sequences (“constituent insertions”) shows that most are integrated in the same way as their lone counterparts. These too are treated as (compound) borrowings, largely motivated by the semantic imperative of expressing plurality while eschewing inflection. As borrowings, they do not constitute exceptions to code-switching constraints, confirming that the status of mixed items cannot be determined in isolation; they must be contextualized with respect to the remainder of the bilingual system, including donor, recipient, and other mixed-language elements

Agreement and Clitic Doubling in Arabic

This dissertation investigates the difference between phi-agreement and clitic doubling using Tunisian (Maghrebi) and Palestinian (Levantine) Arabic as an empirical ground: I look at the same series of morphophonological clitics in both dialects, in four different contexts, and show that we can distinguish two syntactic types: Doubling clitics and agreement clitics. I defend a tripartite taxonomy of clitics, where doubling clitics are neither pronouns nor agreement, but at a discrete stage on the grammaticalization path between the former and the latter. I analyze doubling clitics as heads that are part of the extended projection of the verb, with the clitic head CL as a μ-binder, requiring an element in its specifier binding a trace or a pronoun. By contrast, pronominal clitics are Ds with an elided NP complement, and agreement clitics are the realization of a phi-probe in T

The Dialect of Sfax (Tunisia)

This paper aims to describe the most outstanding features of the Arabic spoken in Sfax, the second largest city in Tunisia, which is located 270km southeast of Tunis. It is based on a fieldwork conducted in the old city of Sfax in September 2016. To the best of my knowledge, this dialect hasn't been thoroughly documented yet, except for one short description written by Dhouha Lajmi, which was based on her ‘empirical experience of the linguistic situation in Sfax' (Lajmi 2009). This article is an attempt to fill this lacuna in the field of Tunisian dialectology, by providing a linguistic sketch of the most prominent features of the Sfaxi dialect on the phonological, morphological, and morphosyntactic levels. While falling into the pre-Hilali category, this dialect retains some archaisms that make it very different from other varieties in Tunisia, and more generally in North Africa, making it useful for the account of the history of Maghrebi Arabic

Maltese

This chapter presents an overview of the most prominent contact-induced developments in the history of Maltese, a language which is genetically a variety of Arabic, but which has undergone significant changes, largely as a result of lengthy contact with Sicilian, Italian, and English. We first address the precise affiliation of Maltese and the nature of the historical and ongoing contact situations, before detailing relevant developments in the realms of phonology, inflectional and derivational morphology, syntax and lexicon

Agreement patterns with the nouns nas and salam in damascus arabic

This paper examines the agreement patterns with the controllers nās and ʕālam in Damascus Arabic, a question not yet thoroughly studied. The collective nature of these nouns allows two kinds of agreement: strict agreement in the plural and deflected agreement in the feminine singular. The analysis focuses on the variation between strict and deflected agreement, especially as regards semantic and pragmatic factors, and also the morphological structure of the targets. The study is synchronic and based on data collected in the capital of Syria, Damascus. It is divided into two main sections: the first analyzes target-related factors, including target type, word order, and distance; the second focuses on controller-related factors, including quantification, qualification, reflexibility, specificity, and definiteness. In recent years numerous studies on agreement have been conducted and they indicate parallels among different varieties of Arabic, but such studies mainly address non-human controllers. The results of the present study show a prevalence of strict agreement with the nouns nās and ʕālam. Target type is a key factor in determining the kind of agreement, with distance between controller and target also being important. In line with previous studies, variation in agreement is closely connected to the controller’s degree of individualization or collectivity as perceived by the speaker, who ultimately chooses which kind of agreement to use.Este artículo examina los patrones de concordancia de los nombres nās y ʕālam en árabe de Damasco, una cuestión aún no estudiada en profundidad. El sentido colectivo de ambos términos controladores permite la concordancia en femenino singular o en masculino plural, por lo que se analiza esta variación atendiendo a factores semánticos y pragmáticos, así como a la estructura morfológica de los términos controlados. La perspectiva del estudio es sincrónica y está basada en un corpus de textos recogidos en Damasco. Se divide en dos partes: (1) Factores relacionados con el término controlado (tipología; posición en la oración; distancia con respecto al término controlador). (2) Factores relacionados con el término controlador (cuantificación; cualificación; reflexividad; especificación; determinación). Asimismo, los estudios sobre la concordancia, particularmente prolíficos en los últimos años, han permitido trazar paralelismos con otras variedades árabes. Los resultados muestran una mayor frecuencia de concordancia en plural. Además, la tipología del término controlador es un factor relevante en la concordancia, así como una cierta distancia entre controlador y controlado. Por último, y de acuerdo con estudios anteriores, la variación en la concordancia está estrechamente relacionada con el grado de individualidad o colectividad del controlador percibido por el hablante quién, en última instancia elige el tipo de concordancia

Arabic and contact-induced change

This volume offers a synthesis of current expertise on contact-induced change in Arabic and its neighbours, with thirty chapters written by many of the leading experts on this topic. Its purpose is to showcase the current state of knowledge regarding the diverse outcomes of contacts between Arabic and other languages, in a format that is both accessible and useful to Arabists, historical linguists, and students of language contact