First Evidence of Stage III Verbal Negation in Tunisian Coastal Dialects

The present paper provides a preliminary description of verbal negation in the
two neighboring dialects of Mahdia and Chebba, belonging to the groups of
Tunisian coastal village dialects. This dialectal group has been, so far, dramatically
understudied, despite its importance for the dialectal geography and history
of North African Arabic. Like most other varieties of Maghrebi Arabic, the
dialects of Mahdia and Chebba underwent the so-called Jespersen’s cycle, consisting
in the doubling of the original prefixal negation, in dialectal Arabic mā
(Stage I), with a suffixal negative particle -š, resulting in the circumfixal negation
mā … š (Stage II) and, eventually, in the loss of the prefixal mā (Stage III).
With regard to Arabic, Stage III was so far undocumented in North Africa, with
the exception of Maltese. This paper provides samples of the three different
stages in the dialects under investigation and offers some hypotheses concerning
the possible locus of innovation with regard to Tunisian, contributing to
our knowledge of negation in North African Arabic.