Determiner phrase: How specific is it in Moroccan Arabic-French codeswitching?

Nominal insertions in Moroccan Arabic-French codeswitching are very common. They typically appear as French maximal projections embedded in a larger constituent headed by the Arabic determiners wāḥəd and hād. However, the reasons behind the insertion of determiners have not been clarified. This study, which relies on the Matrix Language Frame model (Myers-Scotton 1993), seeks to elucidate the factors inducing the insertion of determiners in the morphosyntactic and semantic frame of Moroccan Arabic. Analyzing eleven hours of recorded data, we will show that on the morphosyntactic level, the mismatch between Moroccan Arabic and French definiteness, gender and number may explain the frequency of such insertions. Though, morphosyntactic structure is not the only factor at play in contexts where determination is complex in both languages, and we thus need to take into account other domains such as the semantic, pragmatic and enunciative ones.