Heidelberg University Publishing

The major issue that is raised in this paper is how to delimit depictive secondary predicates from adverbials in Moroccan Arabic (henceforth MA). In syntactic description, depictives and adverbials are both adjuncts and hence are non-obligatory elements in sentences. A basic contrast between the two, however, is ‘their different semantic orientation within the event-internal modification’ (Schroeder 2008: 340). Depictive constructions are adjuncts that add a second predication to one of the participants involved in the main predication, while adverbials are event-oriented in that they add information about manner, time or place to the meaning of a verb. Cross-linguistic research has shown that while it is easy to make a distinction between depictives and adverbials in some languages such as English because they have different morpho-syntactic correlates, in other languages ‘the distinction between participant- and event-orientation is often difficult to draw, and languages abound with constructions which straddle the line between the two’ (Reinöhl and Himmelmann 2011: 131). Much of the research that has examined this issue of how to delimit depictives from other adjuncts such as adverbials was carried out on European languages. The goal of this paper is twofold. First, it provides data from MA, a typologically different language where in some cases depictives converge formally with adverbials and hence the need to find criteria that help distinguish between the two arises. Second, it analyses a special category of depictives that are realised by zero-marked nouns and that are under-resourced compared to the prototypical depictives, which occur in the form of adjectives.

Keywords depictives, secondary predicates, adverbials, adjuncts, zero-marked nouns, Moroccan Arabic