Deriving Morphological Causatives in Moroccan Arabic

Abstract

： This paper explores the nature of the post-syntactic operations responsible for the representations of the linear order of terminal nodes. In particular, it argues in favor of a unified model of the morphosyntax and morphophonology, wherein the theory of Distributed Morphology and Optimality Theory operate in a single module. The testing ground is an investigation of the formation of morphological causatives in Moroccan Arabic. Herein, the process of realizing causatives is morphological gemination, whereby the second consonant of the root is doubled. Investigating the question of what triggers the infixal process, I argue against the linearization algorithm suggested in Embick & Noyer (2001), Embick & Marantz (2008), and Embick (2006, 2010). Instead, the claim I defend here is that the onus of the linearization process falls on the prosody in Arabic, the central assumption being that the morphosyntactic structure, the output of the syntactic derivation, is the input to OT morphophonological constraints. These constraints are responsible for the linearization of the terminal nodes of the syntactic derivation. I show that adopting one theory over others misses important generalizations about the language.