Antecedents and Determiner Phrases in Zarma

Abstract

Information about the nature and the forms of pronouns, anaphors and referential expressions of Zarma, a Nilo-Saharan language of the Songhai group, abounds in the descriptive literature, but there has not been any known thorough and comprehensive analysis of these items, especially within the modern approach to Binding Theory. And perhaps, on the assumption that a fundamental restriction exists on the way languages express their rules of construal. I therefore examine pronouns, anaphors and referential expressions and show that the language distinguishes between reflexives and reciprocals at least morphologically, whereas they share obvious syntactic and semantic properties. I point out that pronouns, particularly the long forms of the third person, nga and ngey, have pronominal as well as anaphoric properties; they sometimes make evident antilocality effects of the Condition B type i.e. they do have local antecedents. I adopt the movement approach to harmonise the opposite demands of binding conditions on pronouns, anaphors and referential expressions. I make use of the same approach to discuss the interrelationship between control and binding and explicate the relevance of precedence and c-command to the formulation of binding vis-à-vis Zarma data. This study gives an interesting account of the grammatical properties and the interpretation of nominal and pronominal expressions (determiner phrases) from Zarma; an aspect of the language that has hitherto not received any systematic linguistic attention.