Anaphoricty and Logophoricity in Egyptian Arabic "EA": A Minimalist Approach

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate anaphoricity and logophoricity with a special focus on Egyptian Arabic (EA), which is the standard colloquial Egyptian dialect of the Arabic language. The analysis investigated in this study addresses two issues. The first issue is to find an explanation for the violation of some reflexives in EA. The second issue is to specify the diagnostics of logophors in EA. To find answers for these two issues, the analysis of anaphoricity and logophoricity is introduced within the framework of Chomsky's Minimalist Program (MP) (1995, 2000, and 2004) and its basic principles. The Chomskyan Principle A of the Binding Theory (BT) deals with reflexives within the domain of the clause. In contrast, logophors, in EA, violate the conditions constrained by Principle A of BT. In order to account for this violation, it is necessary to resort to Syntax, Pragmatics, and Syntax interface. In African languages, regular reflexives and logophors have distinct morphological forms. In contrast, the confusion, in EA and English, arises from being the anaphoric reflexives and logophors/Locally Free Reflexives (LFRs) have the same morphological form. Furthermore, constructions from EA shed light on the distinction between syntax and discourse with respect to 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 discourse considerations, such as the internal speaker's perspective, verbs of communication, and the subject of consciousness (SC). This analysis confirms the hypothesis that logophors are not puzzling and can be analyzed under a universal mechanism and diagnostics that can account for logophoricity in EA and other languages too.