Dealing with the phonology, and touching on the morpho-phonology, of Amazighe, the paper by Karim Bensoukas starts from the observation that in the stress system of Moroccan Amazighe syllables that have a full underlying vowel are treated as heavy, while those that have an epenthetic schwa are treated as light. The author’s claim is that this reveals that the language has variable closed syllable weight. While this is interesting in itself, the language has a further twist consisting in its treating as heavy other closed syllables resulting from another vowel epenthesis process, which is motivated morpho-phonologically. The hypothesis that the author defends is that Amazighe schwa does not contribute to the weight of the syllable hosting it while full vowels do, irrespective of their underlying or epenthetic status.

    The paper by Abdelaziz Boudlal deals with one of the thorny issues in Moroccan Arabic phonology, namely schwa epenthesis. The assumption underlying the author’s work is that epenthesis is basically the outcome of conflicting markedness and alignment constraints along with other constraints on syllable structure. The paper distinguishes two types of syllables: major syllables whose nucleus is one of the vowels /a, u, i/; and minor syllables consisting solely of a consonant. The disparity between CCC and CCC patterns is seen to be the product of right-alignment of the stem with a prominent syllable, being a major syllable. Exceptions to right-alignment come from words on the pattern CCC which abide by the sonority constraints, forcing the schwa to insert before the most sonorous segment in a /CCC/ sequence.

Abstract

    Said Imouzaz’s paper accounts for labial relations in loan words as they are integrated into Moroccan Arabic. This linguistic phenomenon exhibits a special process of dissimilation of high vocoïds in that it presents a “circular chain shift”. In other words, the underlying high vocoïd changes its characteristic features while adopting those of the singular form, and comes back to its initial state once in the broken plural. The analysis proposes to account for labial relations by comparing the singular and plural forms, making use of the tools offered by Correspondence Theory and Sympathy Theory.

    Northern dialects of Moroccan Arabic are also dealt with in this collection. The first treatment is in the paper by Daouia Laaboudi, who deals with emphasis spread in Bni Zeroual Jebli Moroccan Arabic. The underlying hypothesis defended in this paper is that emphasis is a retracted tongue root harmony; if the stem contains a triggering underlying emphatic segment, emphasis spreads across the stem but never goes beyond it. Exceptions to this generalization come from some palatal segments as well as certain types of affixes bearing specific morphological information, which tend to block this spread in much the same way. The analysis proposes to deal with emphasis spread by making reference to two types of constraints: Alignment constraints and markedness constraints.

    Dealing with a totally different issue from those in the papers so far, the paper by Nabila Louriz tries to account for primary stress in the initial state of L3. It analyzes the stress patterns found in the interphonology of Moroccan students, speakers of Moroccan Arabic and French, learning English as a third language, with the aim to design a model for the acquisition of L3 phonology. The study also analyzes the interlanguage beginner data as a whole, aiming to understand the changes that occur in the phonology of learners acquiring a third language. The hypothesis defended in the paper is that the constraints accounting for L3 phonology are but the result of a reranking of those constraints already proposed for L1 and L2.

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    Another take at Northern Moroccan Arabic is t be found in the paper by Samira Rguibi, who deals with consonantal lenition and contrasts in the consonantal inventory in Tazi Moroccan Arabic. The author shows that the post-vocalic position and that after continuant consonants are basically the two different environments in which lenition takes place. This phonological process seems to affect the stricture of the front articulators [coronal] and [labial] more than it does that of the back articulator [dorsal]. The notion of contrastiveness is shown to emerge from constraint interaction without resorting to the representational and derivational assumptions of the standard model, or the feature geometry model.

    The paper by Mohammed Balboul, written in Arabic, consists of an introduction to the framework of Optimality Theory. A few applications of OT to Standard Arabic are also given, and, by the same token, the paper indirectly gives translations of OT concepts into Arabic. We hope that the paper will make the framework of OT accessible to a larger audience of specialists, students, and non-linguists.