id-Plurals

Reading 1: id-plurals in Tashlhit

Summary: Ancillary though it may seem, id-pluralization is a productive process that is quite distinct from the more common concatenative (sound) and non-concatenative (broken) pluralizations of Tashlhit, a variety of Moroccan Amazigh spoken in southwest Morocco. id-pluralization raises various issues of a morphological, morpho-syntactic, as well as lexical nature. The very need for id- pluralization is a thorny issue, especially if we take into consideration the fact that the Tashlhit ‘normal’ type of pluralization is rich enough and quite complex as it is, a pending challenge being how to formally predict which nouns undergo which pluralization and how to encode this lexically. Formally, id-pluralization targets consonant-initial nouns, while vowel-initial nouns undergo sound/broken pluralization. Still, no matter how true this generalization may be, it would be an over-simplistic approach to seal the remaining issues. For one thing, the categorization of id-pluralization as a morphological process, and by the same token that of the affix id, need to be addressed. The possibility I explore is that this type of pluralization is a case of extragrammatical morphology (e.g. Zwicky and Pullum, 1987; Mattiello, 2013). A related issue is the morphological typology exhibited by id-pluralization, namely the highly synthetic (if not polysynthetic) features of some of the items subject to id-pluralization. These stand in stark opposition to the more time-honored root-and-pattern ones, which rely on the consonantal root as the base of derivation (for recent discussions, see Bensoukas, 2018; Boumalk, 2018; El Hamdi, 2018; Lahrouchi, 2018). id-pluralization rather takes words as inputs and is definitely not a root-and-pattern morphology. 

Reading 2:  Tashlhit id-plurals and Moroccan Arabic -at plurals 

Summary: Lesser studied Moroccan Amazigh and Arabic plurals are id-plurals and at-plurals, respectively, which include morphologically simple/complex words, items with expressive morphology, and borrowings. These are quite distinct from Afro-Asiatic concatenative and non-concatenative ones. The paper aims first at establishing commonalities between them, specifically focusing on Arabic masculine at-plurals. The further goal is to check whether at-pluralization is cognate to id-pluralization or substratal thereof. The paper claims that the specifics of at-plurals which differ from those of cognate Arabic varieties are the result of contact and are probably a shift-induced interference.