The Prosody and Morphology of a Moroccan Arabic dialect: An Optimality-Theoretic Account

The book treats some aspects of the prosodic phonology and morphology of Casablanca Moroccan Arabic within Optimality Theory, a grammatical framework introduced in Prince and Smolensky (1993) and developed in McCarthy and Prince (1993) and other subsequent related works. Throughout this book, it is argued that prosodic aspects such as syllable structure and stress, and morphological aspects such as the nisba adjective, the causative, the passive participle and the diminutive are better understood as cases involving interaction between two types of universal, often conflicting constraints: markedness constraints and faithfulness constraints and their respective ranking. The book constitutes a contribution to Moroccan Linguistics and is the first to have applied Optimality Theory to the study of the prosody and morphology of Moroccan Arabic. Its findings serve not only the academic interests of the specialists in linguistics but also those laypeople seeking background knowledge about basic aspects of the grammar of Moroccan Arabic.