Mohamed Lahrouchi

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• PhD & HDR
• Research Director at French National Centre for Scientific Research

This article examines the internal structure of triconsonantal roots in Tashlhiyt Berber. It is proposed that these roots have a binary-branching head-complement structure, built upon the sonorant and the segment immediately to its left. Evidence for this structure is provided by the imperfective formation. It is argued that only roots that display...

Haitian has optional regressive nasal assimilation in a vowel-nasal (VN) context: /fami/ [fa˜mi] ‘family’. It is found also in recent loanwords in contexts where the source lacks phonetic nasalization. This process systematically underapplies in VNs that correspond to vowel rhotic-nasal (VRN) sequences in French: [+a˜m] chambre ‘room’ vs. [+am] cha...

In Tashlhiyt Berber nouns, grammatical gender is usually expressed on both edges of the noun by the segment /t/. However, at the right edge, there is another, more minor pattern: many grammatically feminine nouns end in a vowel. The regular realization involves a final /t/ associated to a suffixal CV unit. Vowel-final feminine nouns are derived whe...

Tashlhiyt is a low-resource language with respect to acoustic databases, language corpora, and speech technology tools, such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. This study investigates whether a method of cross-language re-use of ASR is viable for Tashlhiyt from an existing commercially-available system built for Arabic. The source and t...

Strong similarities observed between babbling and first words suggest a universal foundation of word production in children. The aim of this work was to evaluate the role of biomechanical constraints on babbling and first words production in two children acquiring Tashlhiyt, a Berber language spoken in Morocco. When considering isolated sounds and...

This study examines the acceptability of voweled and vowelless nonwords produced by a native speaker of Tashlhiyt (a Moroccan Amazigh language) across listeners from five different language groups: L1 Tashlhiyt, L1 Tarifit, L1 Moroccan Arabic, L1 English, and L1 Mandarin. The languages vary in the complexity of allowable word types, though only Tas...

In some languages, the distribution of occlusion is highly restricted and interacts with bipositionality. Ulfsbjorninn and Lahrouchi, henceforth UL, (Ulfsbjorninn, Shanti & Mohamed Lahrouchi. 2016. The typology of the distribution of Edge: The propensity for bipositionality. Papers in Historical Phonology 1. 109–129) present a typology of this dist...

Vowelless words are exceptionally typologically rare, though they are found in some languages, such as Tashlhiyt (e.g., fkt 'give it'). The current study tests whether lexicons containing tri-segmental (CCC) vowelless words are more difficult to acquire than lexicons not containing vowelless words by adult English speakers from brief auditory expos...

Morpholophonological analysis of gemination in the Imperfective stem in Tashlhiyt Berber, with supporting evidence from perception and rhyme priming

Berber languages present a wealth of intricate phonological alternations involving glides and high vowels, some of which still resist standard phonological analyses. Glides typically appear in the immediate vicinity of a vowel, in complementary distribution with the corresponding high vowels: e.g. Tashlhiyt Berber gru ‘pick up’ vs agraw ‘assembly’,...

This study examines the perceptual mechanisms involved in the processing of words without vowels, a lexical form that is common in Tashlhiyt but highly dispreferred cross-linguistically. In Experiment 1, native Tashlhiyt and non-native (English-speaking) listeners completed a paired discrimination task where the middle segment of the different-pair...

Clear speech is a type of listener-oriented, intelligibility-enhancing mode of speaking. It has been shown to enhance the perceptibility of many different types of phonological contrasts, cross-linguistically. An open question is whether all phonological contrasts are enhanced to an equivalent extent in clear speech. In the current study, we ask wh...

Tashlhiyt Berber is known for having typologically unusual word-initial phonological contrasts, specifically word-initial singleton-geminate minimal pairs (e.g., sin vs. ssin) and sequences of consonants that violate the sonority sequencing principle (e.g., non-rising sonority sequences: fsin). The current study investigates the role of a listener-...

This paper draws attention to a particular type of consonant epenthesis in Tashlhiyt Berber, which some readers may not even qualify as such for reasons that will be immediately apparent. Firstly, the context in which the consonant is inserted would normally trigger vowel epenthesis in languages other than Tashlhiyt (illicit consonant clusters cros...

This paper, mainly devoted to the French hypocoristic formations, offers a Strict CV account for word minimality. It argues that the shape of the truncated forms can be analyzed without appeal to any prosodic hierarchy. The template that the truncated forms use minimally consists of two CV units, which correspond to the minimal domain where Proper...

Feminine Gender exponence in Tashlhiyt Berber nouns. A morpho-phonological account is proposed in this paper.

This paper, mainly devoted to the French hypocoristic formations, offers a Strict CV account for word minimality. It argues that the shape of the truncated forms can be analyzed without appeal to any prosodic hierarchy. The template which the truncated forms use minimally consists of two CV units, which correspond to the minimal domain where Proper...

This article examines the adaptation of the French rhotic in Berber. In loanwords borrowed from French, the uvular fricative is systematically interpreted as a coronal tap, despite the fact that Berber has phonemic /ʁ/ and /χ/. It is argued that this phenomenon is determined by phonological rather than phonetic factors. It is shown that Tashlhiyt B...

Strong similarities observed between babbling and first words suggest a universal foundation of word production in children. The aim of this work was to evaluate the role of biomechanical constraints on babbling and first words production in two children acquiring Tashlhiyt, a Berber language spoken in Morocco. When considering isolated sounds and...

This article examines the adaptation of the French rhotic in Berber. In loanwords borrowed from French, the uvular fricative is systematically interpreted as a coronal tap, despite the fact that Berber has phonemic /ʁ/ and /χ/. It is argued that this phenomenon is determined by phonological rather than phonetic factors. It is shown that Tashlhiyt B...

This paper examines the adaptation of the French rhotic in Berber. In loanwords borrowed from (“Standard”) French, the uvular fricative is systematically interpreted as a coronal tap, despite the fact that Berber has phonemic /ɣ/ and /x/: e.g. byʁo > biru ‘office’, sɛʁʒɑ̃ > ʃarʒan ‘sergeant’, tχɛ̃ > træn ‘train’. Two hypotheses are discussed: One...

The purpose of this work is to derive a typology of branching onsets based on the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP), and the CVCV skeleton introduced by Lowenstamm (1996). It is claimed that if two consonants are sufficiently distinct to form a branching onset, then any set of even more distinct consonants can legitimately also form a branching on...

This presentation combines Melody-to-Structure Licensing Constraints (MSLCs) with the hypothesis of asymmetric headedness. The goal is to improve the formalisation of phonotactics and especially those related to headedness. Szigetvári (2017) effectively proposes that the phonological grammar of English contains a restriction on the branching of the...

This paper addresses the question of the evolution k → t and g → d from Latin to (Old) French. Briefly stated, k,g become t,d when followed by a front (syncopated) vowel <i,e> plus a rhotic consonant , and preceded by a consonant (e.g. Lat. vinc(e)re > OFr. veintre). Of particular interest is the case of k which is expected to become ʦ (→ s) in the...

This article provides new evidence for the head-complement hypothesis in Tashlhiyt verbal roots. Originally proposed to account for the distribution of consonants in triliteral roots and their behaviour towards gemination in the imperfective stem (Lahrouchi 2009, 2010), the head-complement hypothesis holds that roots containing an obstruant-sonoran...

Cet article présente des arguments empiriques et théoriques en faveur de la racine consonantique en amazighe. D’abord, nous montrons dans deux variétés de langages secrets que les locuteurs sont capables d’isoler dans les mots-source tachelhit des consonnes exclusivement radicales et les transforment ensuite par diverses opérations morphologiques i...

This paper outlines some of the main phonological and morphological features that Moroccan Arabic has developed in contact with Amazigh. Based on previous work, it is argued that Moroccan Arabic has lost the Classical Arabic short vowels and has developed a short central vowel used to break up illicit consonant clusters. It is shown that the distri...

This paper aims at formally describing various language specific interrelations between features/elements and structures/positions. We will propose a mechanism (provided by UG) which explains how grammars of languages encode these language specific statements. The cause of these language specific statements are largely substantive/outside of the ph...

This paper outlines some of the main phonological and morphological features that Moroccan Arabic has developed in contact with Amazigh. Based on previous work, it is argued that Moroccan Arabic has lost the Classical Arabic short vowels and has developed a short central vowel, used break up illicit consonant clusters. It is shown that the distribu...

Présentation à la journée Langues et Grammaire en Ile-de-France. Eléments de grammaire contrastive berbère / français.

This paper outlines some of the main phonological and morphological features that Moroccan Arabic has developed in contact with Amazigh. Based on previous work, it is argued that Moroccan Arabic has lost the Classical Arabic short vowels and has developed a short central vowel, used break up illicit consonant clusters. It is shown that the distribu...

Le système verbal de l’arabe et de l’amazighe présente des phénomènes morpho-phonologiques intriguant, qui brouillent l’organisation des paradigmes de conjugaison. Par exemple, l’expression des traits phi engendre au niveau phonologique des alternances vocaliques variées, localement déterminés dans des gabarits pré-spécifiés. Cette communication po...

The goal of this study is to provide crosslinguistic data on the acquisition of phonetic complexity among children acquiring four different languages: Tunisian Arabic, Tashlhiyt Berber, English, and French. Using an adaptation of Jakielski's (2000) Index of Phonetic Complexity (IPC), we carried out an analysis to assess phonetic complexity of child...

Many studies have been devoted to rhotic consonants, which aimed to establish a unity in their phonological behaviour, despite their high phonetic variability. In many languages, these consonants behave as a class whose phonological properties often revolved around the same set of features (see Hall 1997, Walsh Dickey 1997, Wiese 2001, 2011, among...

These files record phonological productions from two Tachelhit (Berber) children in Morocco. Ima (F) from 0;9.26 to 2;0.15 with 31 sessions. Imane was born 20-FEB-2003. Red (M) from 0;8.07 to 1;10.11 with 28 sessions. Reda was born 10-APR-2003.

In many Berber varieties, causative and reciprocal verbs are built by means of monoconsonantal prefixes attached to a stem. These prefixes are realized as single or geminated depending on the properties of the stem. In this paper, it is argued that an initial templatic site is responsible for the length variation of the prefixes. Under specific lic...

The vowel system of the Maghrebi Arabic dialects (MA) contains three peripheral vowels /i, a, u/ and one short central vowel, often referred to as schwa. A comparison between Classical Arabic (CA) and MA clearly shows that the latter lost length contrast in the vowels. In a number of items shared by these languages, there is a regular change whereb...

The vowel system of the Maghrebi Arabic dialects (MA) contains three peripheral vowels /i, a, u/ and one short central vowel, often referred to as schwa. A comparison between Classical Arabic (CA) and MA clearly shows that the latter lost length contrast in the vowels. In a number of items shared by these languages, there is a regular change whereb...

Strong similarities observed between babbling and first words suggest a universal foundation of word production in children. The aim of this work was to evaluate the role of biomechanical constraints on babbling and first words production in two children acquiring Tashlhiyt, a Berber language spoken in Morocco. When considering isolated sounds and...

Présentation succincte du berbère (langue, phonologie, grammaire) dans une optique contrastive berbère/français

This paper presents preliminary results of a longitudinal study that focuses on the developmental trajectory of speech production capacities in two Berber children acquiring Tashlhiyt from the babbling period to the emergence of early grammar. Very few studies, if any, are devoted to the Berber language acquisition, and Tashlhiyt, the variety spoke...

In this paper, it is argued that the expression of person can be captured in terms of a set of semantic features whose exponents follow a unique phonological path.

We provide a unified account of spirantization and rhotacism within Element Theory. We argue that both phenomena result from the loss of one element in the melodic structure.

We discuss the grammatical conditions that can be imposed between segmental content (features) and syllable structure (positions) and how a representational preference can influence diachronic development. The discussion centers on the co-distribution of two properties: occlusivity and bipositionality. The first is the phonological feature that ind...

We discuss a ’rarissima’ language, Ontena Gadsup. This language appears unique in defying the absolute phonological universal that the inventories of all languages must contain oral stop consonants. Fricatives surface as stops in post-consonantal context, specifically after a homorganic nasal: [N_] and a glottal stop [ʔ_]. Because Ontena Gadsup has...

In Moroccan Arabic, like in many other Afroasiatic languages, certain nouns may have more than one plural form. For instance, tʕəsʕwera ‘photo’ has plurals tʕsʕawər and tʕəsʕwerat. However, their diminutive systematically resorts to –at suffixation in the plural. The aim of this study is twofold. First, it presents an interface approach which aims...

Cette présentation aborde quelques traits phonologiques et morphologiques de l’’amazighe (berbère) en évolution dans le milieu urbain, notamment la perte partielle de l’état construit, de l’harmonie des sibilantes, de la négation et de la distinction du genre dans les clitiques objet.

Haitian, a French-lexicon based Creole (HC), has a phonemic nasal vowel contrast (e.g. [bɑ̃k] ‘bank’ / [bak] ‘tub’). It has also developed a regressive optional nasal harmony whereby an oral vowel is nasalized when immediately followed by a nasal consonant (e.g. [fɑ̃mi] ‘family’). Any segment intervening between the vowel and the nasal consonant bl...

We present preliminary results of a longitudinal study that focuses on the developmental trajectory of speech production capacities in two Berber children acquiring Tashlhiyt from the babbling period to the emergence of early grammar. Very few studies, if any, are devoted to the Berber language acquisition, and Tashlhiyt, the variety spoken in Sout...

This volume brings together articles by some major figures in various linguistics domains — phonology, morphology and syntax — aiming at explaining the form of linguistic items by exploring the structures that underlie them. The book is divided in 5 parts: vowels, syllables, templates, syntax-morphology interface and Afro-Asiatic languages. Specifi...

This volume brings together articles by some major figures in various linguistics domains — phonology, morphology and syntax — aiming at explaining the form of linguistic items by exploring the structures that underlie them.The book is divided in 5 parts: vowels, syllables, templates, syntax-morphology interface and Afro-Asiatic languages. Specific...

Il règne en berbère un consensus sur la nature et le comportement de I et U comparés à A 1 , et sur l'analyse qui leur est consacrée (voir Destaing 1920, Applegate 1971, Dell & Elmedlaoui 2002, et Guerssel 1986 pour un traitement partiellement différent). I et U sont traités comme des objets phonologiques qui se réalisent en glides au voisinage imm...

One of the puzzling aspects of the Berber languages is the nature of the construct state and the cooccurrence restrictions it undergoes with certain grammatical morphemes. In particular, the reason why the construct state marker w- never occurs with the gender marker t- remains unclear, despite of several studies mostly syntactic. This paper argues...

Alienable and non-alienable possessives in Moroccan Arabic

Berber languages present a wealth of intricate phonological alternations involving glides and high vowels, some of which still resist standard phonological analyses. These alternations shed light on the kind of inter-modular communication, which many current interface theories address. Glides typically appear in the immediate vicinity of a vowel, i...

This paper examines the vocalic patterns in the plural forms of four languages in Afroasiatic. Focus is made on the co-occurrence restrictions that the vowels obey in these forms; particularly it is shown that plurals in which high vowels co-occur are excluded. This restriction is argued to follow form the active role of the well-known Obligatory...

This article offers supporting evidence for the Root-and-Template model of morphology. It is argued that the consonantal root and the template are the basic morphological units handled in Tagnawt and Taqjmit (two secret languages used by women in Tashlhiyt Berber). Speakers are able to extract from Tashlhiyt forms only root consonants, and then dis...

L'intérêt de ce numéro est double : il s'agit d'abord de présenter les résultats de recherches sur la question de la structure des mots, dans diverses langues naturelles, typologiquement aussi éloignées que le sont le français et l'arabe, le berbère et l'italien. Il s'agit également de fournir quelques références pédagogiques aux étudiants intéress...

An outstanding issue in Tashlhiyt Berber phonology is the status of the short central vowel (schwa) that appears in certain consonant clusters, and its relation to the remaining (peripheral) vowels in the language. We show that within Tagnawt, a secret language in Tashlhiyt Berber used by women, peripheral vowels are underlyingly long, in that they...

Cet article porte sur les restrictions de cooccurrence qui pèsent sur les marqueurs de l'état construit et du genre d'un côté, et les marqueurs de l'inaccompli et du causatif de l'autre côté. Il est proposé que ces restrictions découlent de contraintes gabaritiques, charactérisées par une compétition de ces marqueurs pour occuper des positions pré-...

Eléments de base de la phonologie du gouvernement et du modèle CVCV de syllabation.

This paper presents original data from Taqjmit, a secret language in Tashelhiyt Berber used by women in Southern Morocco. The main principle underlying word formation in this secret language can be stated as follows: to disguise a word, say it twice in one word. It is proposed that only root consonants are kept in the disguised forms, that the repe...

Empirical and theoretical evidence for the role of root consonants in Berber

The goal of this presentation is to investigate the templatic activity underlying morphological operations in a Berber secret language, which can shed light on some theoretical issues such as template structure and its effect on the phonological representation of vowel length. An outstanding issue in Tashlhiyt Berber phonology is the status of the...

L'une des propriétés saillantes des langues afroasiatiques est l'abondance dans leur lexique de racines triconsonantiques 1 . La majorité de ces racines est issue, selon certains linguistes (cf., de racines biconsonantiques 2 . Elles contiennent, en outre, des segments spécifiques qu'Ibn Jinni (-1002) appelle, dans le cas de l'arabe classique, Al m...

Tashlhiyt Berber uses, among other processes, gemination to form the imperfective. Most accounts of this phenomenon make reference to syllabic or prosodic structure. In this paper, I diverge from this trend, claiming that imperfective gemination is better analyzed as a templatic-based phenomenon resulting from morphological activity at the skeletal...

In Moroccan Arabic it is widely accepted that short vowels are mostly elided, resulting in consonant clusters and consonant geminates. In this paper we present evidence from our exploratory timing study that challenges this widely accepted principle. We work with minimal pairs of singleton consonants vs. geminates (e.g. /bka/ vs. /bəkka/) that reve...

This paper deals with the constraints which limit the nature and the distribution of segments in Tashlhiyt Berber triconsonantal roots. Unlike in Classical Arabic, where a root may consist entirely of voiceless obstruents (e.g. kSf ”pull away”, kfs ”be bandy-legged”, ksf ”be or become dark”), in Tashlhiyt Berber: [1] (i) each triconsonantal root co...

In Lowenstamm (1999), it is argued that each word of a major category is preceded by an empty CV site, which replaces the traditional SPE symbol #. The postulation of this site, filled by means of phonological operations involving licensing status (Kaye, Lowenstamm & Vergnaud 1990), pits two types of languages against each other: (i) type I languag...

"Pour déguiser un mot, dites-le deux fois en un seul mot". Tel semble être le principe de base qui sous-tend la dérivation dans le langage secret que nous présentons ici. Ce langage, appelé taqjmit, est pratiqué par des femmes berbères originaires d'Isouktane, au sud du Maroc. Nous montrons que le principe de répétition à la base du déguisement dan...

In several languages tones and vowels seem to interact directly or indirectly: (a) In the Foochow dialect of Chinese –Northern Min languages-High tones morphophonemically raise vowels from low to mid and from mid to high (cf. Wang 1967). (b) In Limburg Dutch dialects, tone contrast has given rise to vowel quality differences. That is, diphtongal vo...

Pilszczikowa-Chodak (1972) pointed out a regular correlation between vowel height and tone value in Hausa verbs and noun plurals. She suggested that the values of the tones assigned to the final vowels depend on the quality of these vowels. Thus, for example, a [low] tone is assigned to a [+low] vowel whereas a [+high] vowel has a [high] tone. In h...

In Tashelhiyt Berber, causative and reciprocal verbs are built by means of monoconsonantal prefixes attached to a stem. Depending on properties of the stem, those prefixes will be realized as single or geminate segments. It is argued in this paper that an initial templatic site is responsible for the size variations of the prefixes. Moreover, compl...

Cette thèse est une contribution à l'étude de l'architecture des gabarits. Elle est consacrée à l'analyse de quelques aspects de la morphologie verbale du berbère (Parler chleuh d'Agadir), dans le cadre de la phonologie autosegmentale, et plus particulièrement, dans le cadre de la phonologie du gouvernement. Elle s'inscrit dans un programme scienti...

This thesis is dedicated to the study of some aspects of the verbal morphology of Berber within the framework of government phonology. It contributes to the study of the architecture of templates. It aims at demonstrating that the squelettal level of the phonological representations has an autonomous and independent morphological activity from the...