Binding Theory and Scope in Egyptian Arabic: A Minimalist Approach

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate principles of the Binding Theory (BT) (Chomsky, 1981, 1982, 1986) in Egyptian Arabic (EA) within the framework of Chomsky's Minimalist Program (MP) (1995, 2000a, 2004). The study distinguishes between anaphoricity and logophoricitythrough a new set of data in EA. In West African languages, anaphors and logophors can easily be distinguishable as they have distinct morphological forms. In contrast, the confusion, in EA and English, arises from being anaphors and logophorshave the same morphological form. In order to account for this confusion, it is necessary to resort to Semantics, Pragmatics, and Syntax interface.Throughout the study, constructions from EA shed light on the distinction between syntax and discourse with respect to the BT. On the one hand, anaphors have some syntactic constraints, such as C-command and local domain. On the other hand, logophors are motivated by semantic considerations, such as the internal speaker's perspective, verbs of communication, and the subject of consciousness (SC). Furthermore, logophors, in EA, assume different grammatical functions that cannot be assumed by anaphoric reflexives. In addition,this study focuses on the importance of the semantic side of agreement variation and the notion of individuation, as investigated by Belnap (1993).It is shown that distinguishing between deflected and strict agreement depends on the speaker's perspective of plural subjects. Moreover, there is a feeding relation between the subject-predicate agreement and the binder-bindee agreement in EA.In addition, the parallelism between PIs and principles of the BT is one of the contributions in this thesis.It has been proved that NPIs and anaphora are governed by Principle A of the BT in EA. NPIs in EA can be licensedeither via c-command mechanism or Spec-head configuration. In addition, the study shows a parallelism between PPIs and Principle B in EA. Equally important, this study argues that R-expressions, which are represented by Principle C of the BT, can be co-referential with another R-expression, an epithet or a preceding pronoun as long as there is not a c-command relation between them. This thesis also illustrates the feeding relation between movement and Referential dependency and the relation between definiteness and co-referentiality.