Šūf, yaʕni... fhǝmti? Segnali discorsivi da verbi di percezione e verbi cognitivi in arabo marocchino

Highly frequent in unplanned spontaneous speech, discourse markers (henceforth DMs) are linguistic items used strategically to convey a number of functions related to the interpersonal and interactive dimension of conversation, to discourse structuring, and to the speaker’s stance and attitudes. Although the last years have witnessed an increasing interest in research on DMs in a language-specific as well as a comparative contrastive perspective, only a small number of studies have been devoted to Arabic and its varieties. Based on a corpus of spoken language consisting of fieldwork data, this article aims to contribute to fill this gap by presenting an original work on the most common deverbal DMs of Moroccan Arabic, i.e. those derived from verbs of cognition and perception. To this end, the paper firstly provides an overview of the verbs of cognition and perception of Moroccan Arabic by highlighting the most relevant ones in terms of discourse-pragmatic productivity, with a particular focus on their semantics. Secondly, it analyzes the functions and contexts of use of the DMs derived from these verbs. Finally, it discusses the correlation between the (multi)functionality of the DMs observed and the semantics of their source lexemes.