loan verbs in arabic and the do-construction
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The second strategy to incorporate foreign verbs, with the help of a DO-construction is frequently used in a migration context, for instance, in Moroccan Arabic/Dutch code-mixing in the Netherlands, where the light verb dar ‘to do’ is constructed with Dutch verbs, e.g. dar ontmoeten ‘to meet’ (< Moroccan Arabic dar ‘to do’ + Dutch ontmoeten ‘to meet [inf.]’, cf. Boumans 1998:229). In the first stage of this process, dar is used with a Dutch infinitive, which functions as the direct object of the auxiliary, so that direct objects of the infinitive itself have to be encoded as indirect objects, as in (1). (1) ana-ya dert-l-u ontmoeten I-Emph do1s-to-him meet.Inf ‘I met him’ (Boumans 1998:229)
This parallels the structure of the construction dar + verbal noun + direct object introduced by l- in monolingual Moroccan Arabic (Boumans 1998:228-229). At a later stage, the verb dar loses its full verbal character and becomes a real auxiliary carrying all inflectional markers of the full verb. The Dutch infinitive no longer functions as the direct object, and its pronominal direct object can therefore be encoded as a direct object, as in (2) and (3). (2) ka-ne-bġi n-dir-hum ontmoeten Dur-1sg-want 1s-do-them meet.Inf ‘I want to meet them’ (Boumans 1998:231) (3) ma ka-t-dir-ha-š voelen Neg Progr-2s-do-it-Neg feel.Inf ‘Don’t you feel it?’ (Boumans 1998:233)
According to Boumans (1998:262), the use of the DO-construction with dar in Moroccan Arabic/Dutch code-switching is a good example of a grammaticalisation process, by which the Moroccan Arabic full verb dar becomes a device to embed Dutch verbs in Moroccan Arabic. The various stages of such a grammaticalisation are illustrated by Backus’ (1996:241-244) analysis of the Turkish light verb yap- in Turkish/Dutch code-switching. This verb exhibits a decreasing semantic load, depending on the object with which it is combined. When a verbal noun is the object of yap-, the semantic load of the verb is rather low (e.g., yemek yap- ‘to make food’, aktiviteit-ler-i yap ‘to perform activities’, kutlama yap- ‘to congratulate’, and all the