Reflexives and Reciprocals in English and Modern Standard Arabic: An Investigation and a Comparison

The aim of this paper is to investigate the typology of reflexives and reciprocals in English and MSA, which is a variety of standardized, literary Arabic used throughout Arab countries. It has shown that MSA morphologically encoded reflexives and reciprocals are in fact syntactically and semantically asymmetrical. It will be argued that morphologically encoded reflexives do not project an anaphor (an internal argument) syntactically and their morphological marker semantically serves as a reflexivizer, whereas morphologically encoded reciprocals do project an anaphor syntactically, realized either overtly or covertly. Concerning the distribution of such anaphor, the paper elucidates the admissible and in admissible environments. It is argued that MSA does not allow possessive reflexives, but allow possessive reciprocals such as the construct-state, whether it be a noun phrase or a locative prepositional phrase. This variation is accounted for by assuming that reciprocals occupy Spec of DP and therefore can be bound by an NP from a higher phase, whereas reflexives occupy a position lower than the D head and thus must be bound within their DP phase. Finally yet importantly, MSA override reflexives and reciprocals unlike their English counterparts, are always subject to the Principle A of the Binding Theory.