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Prosodic Morphology in Moroccan Arabic

Prosodic morphology examines the interplay between phonological and morphological structures, particularly in the context of Moroccan Arabic diminutives. The document discusses two types of morphological analysis: item and arrangement morphology, and item and process morphology, focusing on infixal reduplication and its application to color adjectives. It highlights how prosodic templates influence the formation of diminutives through specific morphological processes.

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5 views1 page

Prosodic Morphology in Moroccan Arabic

Prosodic morphology examines the interplay between phonological and morphological structures, particularly in the context of Moroccan Arabic diminutives. The document discusses two types of morphological analysis: item and arrangement morphology, and item and process morphology, focusing on infixal reduplication and its application to color adjectives. It highlights how prosodic templates influence the formation of diminutives through specific morphological processes.

Uploaded by

Spark Gaming
Copyright
© All Rights Reserved
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Introduction:

Prosodic morphology is a broad theory that refers to a wide range of phenomena. The theory under
investigation handles the relationship between phonological and morphological structure. That is,
the restrictions on size and shape of the word, which are well known as a template. The latter term is
well defined through authentic units of prosody namely, mora, syllable, foot and the prosodic word.
The theory of prosodic morphology focuses on understanding how the prosodic structure affects
certain morphological processes such as reduplication and infixation. Such morphological structures
are commonly found in Moroccan Arabic diminutives, especially colour adjectives, in which we are
going to analyse in light of the aforementioned theory.

Circumscription is a mechanism for delimiting a prosodically defined portion of a word to which a


morphological process is then applied. In the data of Moroccan Arabic diminutives below, it can be
noticed that the morphological process being involved is infixal reduplication. Having said that,
morphological analysis contains two types, the first one being item and arrangement morphology
which represents the adjective word ‘’hmər’’ in a concatenative order. The root consists of three
consonants ‘’hmr’’ and then it can be modified by adding the shwa sound as an epenthetic process.
When the infixal reduplication is being inserted, the word takes the shape of ‘’ccvcc’’ (hmimr)
structure. When factoring out the first consonant in ‘’hmimr’’, it will end as ‘’mi+mr’’ and ‘’mi’’ would
be the affix being inserted to form the diminutive, which in turn is taken from the root (m)r. This in
addition to the vowel /i/ which is part of the base ‘’mi’’. This is to say that the there is a copying from
the base to from the adjective color ‘’hmimr’’.

The second type in morphological analysis is item and process morphology in which it can be treated
based on prosodic theory. In this case we use the template ‘’ccvcc’’ to represent the parts of prosodic
structure, which are the root consonants being assigned a mora beneath the template. On top of the
template, the affixal tier is filled with the infixal diminutive morpheme as a reduplicated part copying
from the root consonant ‘’m’’ directly and having associated with a vowel as one mora. This type of
morphology can also be named non-concatenative as there are separate layers being mediated by
the template and the root is located below it, meanwhile the part that is reduplicated being copied
from the root and takes position above the template.

C C V C C

ħmrˤ
μ

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