From Exolingual Communication to Interlingual Communication: When Two Typically Foreign Languages Communicate

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to ask about the mechanisms of linguistic regulation and discursive negotiation resulting from contact between two typically foreign languages, Moroccan Arabic and French, in exolingual communication situations in Moroccan context. To do this, two exolingual communication situations will be analyzed. One is unilingual where the mode of speaking is unilingual (literal Arabic and Moroccan Arabic). The other is bilingual where Moroccan Arabic and French form the bilingual way of speaking. The analysis of the data allows us to identify the compensatory strategies mobilized by the interactants involved both in exolingual-unilingual communication situations and in exolingual-bilingual communication situations. At the end of the study, we discovered that when in an exolingual-unilingual communication situation in the case of complex coding on the part of the competent/ strong speaker, the in-competent/weak interlocutor appeals to phonetically erroneous formulations, the tags such as pauses, hesitations, silence, repetitions and/or clarifying questions. The speaker collects these clues and interprets them as requests for help and in the light of which he activates the maxim of discursive cooperativity. This allows the competent / strong speaker to renegotiate the code of interaction by mobilizing compensatory strategies, among others, the proposal of fair wording, reformulation and simplification. Subsequently, the speaker in a position of verbal distress manages to ratify and confirm the information presented to him. In an exolingual-bilingual interaction, the interactants implement a cooperative in the form of negotiations of meaning, compensatory strategies triggering the metalinguistic dimension of the exchange such as transcoded formulations which translate a whole work of intercomprehension carried out jointly by the interact-ants. It is an implicit negotiation based on procedures and relationships as well as on meaning, and this, through tags, filled pauses, empty pauses, hesitations, repetitions, as well as transcoded marks. Similarly, formulations by extension of meaning such as denominative metaphors or the neologism, provisional formulations, attempts at luck, as well as temptations to literal denomination are among the compensatory strategies resorted to by interactants.