Expressing Modality in Moroccan Arabic: From Auxiliation to Overauxiliation

Abstract:

Moroccan Arabic Auxiliaries (M.A. Aux) constitute one of the grammatical categories in which the action of the dynamic synchrony is actively at work, renovating the collocational patterns and lexical stock of Moroccan Arabic (MA).The M.A.Aux Aux are not directly involved in the making of “compound tenses” as this is the case in English with ‘be’ and ‘have’ or French with ‘être’ and ‘avoir’. Referred to sometimes as Semi- auxiliaries (S-Aux) -and again, unlike English or French in which the number of Auxiliaries is fixed and their syntactic and semantic patterning clearly set, MA candidate forms outnumber their English and French counterparts and are involved actively in expressing modality in MA. In this paper, we will seek to explore how M.A. Aux express a multitude of semantic values, how they are identified; and mostly, how MA tolerate that more than a S-Aux may occur within the same sentence.