Voice Shifts : A Lexico-Syntactic Account of the Berber Syncretic Morpheme [n-]

Résumé

This article is a lexico-syntactic account of the syncretic morpheme [n-] in Berber, specifically in the Tarifit variety spoken in northern Morocco (TB, henceforth). I argue that the bound morpheme [n-] has diachronically developed a capacity to encode reflexive and inchoative voices, a situation that gave birth to what I call voice shifts in this variety under internal lexico-syntactic factors of grammaticalization. I provide empirical data as evidence for the syncretic nature of this bound morpheme; these data are discussed within the framework of minimalism (Chomsky, 2000, 2001, 2008).