The Nature of the verb base. Conference on the verb in all its forms, organized at the Faculté des Lettres, Université Sultan Moulay Slimane, Beni-Mellal 11-12 May 2010 1 The nature of the verb base in Moroccan Arabic prosody Abdelaziz Boudlal Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines El Jadida Abstract The paper explores cases involving what is referred to in the literature on Moroccan Arabic as cyclic schwa syllabification. In particular, it shows why underlying triconsonantal verb sequences such as /CCC-C/, where the final consonant is a subject affix, surfaces as [CCəC-C] (e.g. [ktəb-t] “I wrote”) but not as *[kətb-ət] with the schwa being epenthesized before the final consonant of the verb. It also shows why quadriconsonantal verbs on the pattern /CCCC-C/ can surface as both [CəCCəC-C] (e.g. [kǝrkǝbt]) and [CəCCC-əC] (e.g. [kǝrkbǝk]), depending on the nature of the suffix and on the category of the verb to which this suffix is added. The analysis we offer for these cases is couched within Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004; McCarthy and Prince, 1993, and related works) and derives cyclic syllabification from the interaction of constraints requiring identity between the base form and its morphologically related output form. We show that the disparity in the prosodization of words such as [kǝrkǝbt]) and [kǝrkbǝk] reflects two different types of affixation: affixation to the stem which involves the subject affix [-t] “I”; and affixation to the word which involves the object clitic [-k] “you”. I. PRESENTATION OF THE DATA A. Verb stem + subject marker (1) a. ḍṛb ḍṛəb he hit ḍṛb-t ḍṛəbt I hit ḍṛb-na ḍṛəbna we hit b. ḍṛb-at ḍəṛbat she hit ḍṛb-u ḍəṛbu they hit