The Morphophonology of Moroccan Arabic Derived Causatives

Abstract

This paper aims at investigating the morphophonological make-up of derived causatives in Moroccan Arabic within the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 2004). Causative verbs in MA are characterized by the systematic gemination of their medial consonants. However, it is not easy to determine the morphological nature of the causative morpheme involved in this derivation. Also, it is not clearly known why the causative morpheme gets realized exactly on the second segment of the base form. Therefore, we seek to achieve the following goals. First, we intend to determine the nature of the causative morpheme. Second, we aim to explain why the causative morpheme is realized on the second segment of the base form. In this respect, we show that the causative morpheme is represented by a featureless consonantal mora that targets the second segment of the base root, turning it into a geminate. We also show that the causative morpheme gets infixed thanks to the privileged status of root-initial segments.