The Feasibility of Content and System Morpheme Hierarchy in the Analysis of Tamazight Bilingual Corpora: The Case of Kabyle and Mzabi Bilingual Speech in Oran

This study examines the empirical validity of the hierarchy of system and content morphemes on Tamazight bilingual corpora. This dichotomy is one of the underlying principles of the Matrix Language Frame model and the 4-M model as they have been advocated by Myers- Scotton in 1997, 2002 and 2016. These socio-psychologically based syntactic models have been used by contact linguists as viable alternatives in the investigation and interpretation of the morphosyntactic processes underlying bilingual corpora. The present paper investigates Kabyle and Mzabi bilingual data; it focuses on these two Berber or Tamazight varieties as they are in contact with Algerian Arabic, Standard Arabic and French in an Algerian context, namely Oran city. The study of the communities under light here reveals that the languages composing the verbal repertoire of these Tamazight minorities living in Oran overlap at different linguistic levels including the morpho-syntactic one.