Constraints on Optional Pronoun Use in Spoken Egyptian Arabic

Linguists have noted that there are some languages that can omit subject pronouns entirely. The presence/absence of the pronoun is usually considered to be optional. 55 Eid (1983) advanced the hypothesis that the use of subject pronouns in Arabic is DOt a matter of free choice on the part of the speaker, or solely a matter of emphasis. She argues that the presence/absence of the subject pronoun does have a communicative function independent of emphasis. This paper is an investigation of the constraints on the presence / absence of the subject pronoun in Egyptian Arabic. We examined two plays, 'Amaliyyat Nllllh by Ali Salim and 'Antar n by Saad ai-Din Wahbah. We investigated sentence construction, verb type and other constraints. We counted every sentence to see whether a pronoun was present or not. For the purpose of this paper all sentences with expressed noun subjects were excluded from the analysis. Taking all other sentences (sentences without expressed noun subjects) 36 % of the sentences had expressed pronouns and 64 % had no pronoun present. We then looked to see if any of the possible constraints investigated had a significant effect on this basic statistic. We found that person seemed to be constraining the presence or absence of a pronoun. This was clearl