Rivages, No 5 (2020)

Negation in Moroccan Arabic: A semantico-pragmatic approach

Habib DARKAOUI SOUFI

Résumé


Negation is a phenomenon that is the point of convergence of syntax, semantics/logic, and pragmatics. Most studies, at least those concerned with Moroccan Arabic (MA)1, Benmamoun ( 1995, 2006, 2008), Ouhalla (1993a,b, 1999, 2002) among others, have focused on the syntactic facet of negation, trying to account for it in terms of the syntactic technology that has been developed over the years within the generative paradigm. It will be our task in this article to initiate an attempt to account for the various phenomena of negation in (MA) using an approach that integrates semantics, logic and pragmatics. To this end, we will propose a working hypothesis, namely, “the split negation hypothesis” (SNH) that will be demonstrated to adequately explain and account for some of the phenomena emanating from the interaction of negation with specificity, speaker’s intention, and presupposition.