Abstract
This paper endeavors to explain how Najdi Arabic (NA), one of the dialects spoken in the central region of the Arabian Peninsula, diverges from Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in its anaphoric treatment of R-expressions and pronominals. Data from a native Najdi Arabic informant suggest that only a subset of NA verbs allow proper names to be referentially bound by their antecedent pronouns in interrogative structures. Although this property is characteristic of Najdi Arabic not MSA, it yields certain challenges to the basic tenets of the Binding Theory. While Principle C of the Binding Theory requires R-expressions to be free, a referential reading of the NA data, which syntactically binds proper names with their pronominal referents, violates such principle.
Highlights
While most of the literature on the semantic nature of anaphors in Arabic is devoted to Classical Arabic (Abdul-Ghany, 1981), or Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), many grammatical aspects of Arabic dialects remain unstudied
This paper examines the use of anaphoric pronominals as interrogatives in Najdi, one of the widely-spoken dialects of Arabic
It is important to understand before contemplating a possible explanation to the newly found syntactic configuration of Najdi Arabic (NA) question formation how the Binding Theory operates in anaphoric relations, and why it fails to rule out the occurrence of such structure in NA
Summary
While most of the literature on the semantic nature of anaphors in Arabic is devoted to Classical Arabic (Abdul-Ghany, 1981), or Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), many grammatical aspects of Arabic dialects remain unstudied. This paper examines the use of anaphoric pronominals as interrogatives in Najdi, one of the widely-spoken dialects of Arabic. Arabic is the native language for over 186 million speakers and the liturgical one of almost 250 million people, ranking the sixth among the widely spoken languages of the world. It belongs to the Semitic group of languages and is closely related to Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic (spoken in Ethiopia), and Tigrigna (spoken in Eritrea) (Versteegh, 2014). While NA utilizes pronouns, and pronominals, to formulate questions, such usage is not possible in MSA This emergent construction of interrogatives in NA presents certain challenges to the tenets of the Binding Theory (Haegeman, 1994; Grohmann, Hornstein, and Nunes, 2005). The paper argues that while syntactic binding in and of itself is insufficient to account for the emergent NA data, the Binding Principle when invoked maximally can offer a simple and straightforward analysis
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