The syntax and pragmatics of the Gichuka sentence: a challenge to the minimalist program analysis

Abstract

This study is an analysis of the syntax and pragmatics of Gichuka sentences within the framework of the Minimalist Program, as proposed by Chomsky (1995a), and the Relevance theory as proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1986). The study was motivated by two main gaps: a) not much research has been done on the syntax and pragmatics of Gichuka sentence in general and the mapping of the morpho-syntactic units such as pronominals, lexical NPs and quantified expressions to the truth conditional meaning of sentences in particular; and b) though a number of studies have been done on the morphosyntax of verbs and NPs of languages related to Gichuka, the majority of them focused on the syntactic structure without linking it to meaning. This is precisely what the present study set out to do. This this study found out that the logical form level of representation, as suggested within the Minimalist Program, was inadequately specified to provide an account of the truth conditional meaning of sentences in Gichuka and that it could not independently provide an adequate account of the formmeaning correlations for Gichuka sentences. To address these inadequacies, the study proposes a modification in Chomsky’s (1995) computational system by motivating a syntax―pragmatics approach to account for the derivation of truth conditional meaning for sentences, which involves the process of saturation after spell-out, and the process of enrichment in the lexicon