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Pronouns, agreement and focus in Egyptian Arabic

Malcolm Edwards m.edwards@bbk.ac.uk This paper considers the ‘copula pronouns’ of a dialect of Arabic in the light of recent proposals regarding the emergence of functional categories, and in particular agreement marking. It is argued that the sometimes contradictory properties of copular pronouns are compatible with an analysis in which they develop from actual subject pronouns which have undergone a process of reanalysis from elements in Specifier position to heads of functional categories. This process is cyclical, and has implications for the development of functional categories in general and agreement marking in particular. Introduction In spoken Egyptian Arabic (EA) present tense equational sentences have the form illustrated in 1-3. 1. il-bint hiyya l-mas’u:la the-girl she the-responsible(FemSg) the girl is the one responsible 2. il-riga:la humma il-mas’uli:n the-men they the-responsible(Pl) the men are the ones responsible 3. ‘ana huwwa l-mas’u:l I he the-responsible I am the one responsible As these examples show, equational sentences have the schematic structure DP-PRON-DP, where PRON (emboldened in the examples) is apparently a pronoun functioning as a copula element. The grammar of equational sentences in both Arabic and Hebrew has been widely discussed (see for example Eid 1983, Eid 1991, Doron 1986, Ouhalla 1999, among others), with interest centering on the categorical and functional status of PRON. PRON presents problems for analysis, as it displays a mixture of nominal and verbal properties. PRON has been claimed to be either a suppletive form of copula (Eid 1983, 1991), or following Doron’s (1986) agreement marking in INFL. This latter idea has been explored in the context of Arabic, by Eid (1991, 1992) and Ouhalla (1999), among others. The present paper proposes considers the status of PRON in the light of recent proposals regarding the reanalysis of elements in Spec positions as functional heads (see in particular Simpson and Wu 2002, and Van Gelderen 2004). Specifically it is argued that PRON derives from a cyclical process whereby monomorphemic specifier elements can undergo reanalysis as functional heads. This process in turn can be explained in terms