“Antecedent and Postcedent”: A Syntactic Study of the “ABC’s Principles” of the Binding Theory in the EFL Students’ Written Discourses

This study, whose major objectives were to diagnose the syntactic and un-syntactic affiliations between Antecedent and Postcedent along with their pro-forms in the EFL students’ Written Discourses, entailed a qualitative case study research design. The research placed the author as the key instrument in achieving the aims while the 32 ED students, which were purposively selected, were the research participants. The 1967 Corder’s clinical elicitation, observation, and transcript analysis were the techniques of collecting the data whereas the coding procedures of Error Analysis were drawn on analysing the data. The research findings specifically disclosed that, firstly, the students were capable of syntactically establishing the relationships between the N, NP, and AdjC as Antecedents and the N, NP, and PrepP as Postcedents along with their pro-forms. Accordingly, both provided meanings to their syntactic categories correctly. Secondly, they, however, violated the other syntactic relationships between the Adj, Adv, VP, EC, ES, DW, DWC, SCN/PCN as the Antecedents, and C1 it-extraposition and C2 as Postcedents and their pro-forms. The violations sourced from the students’ ignorance and naivety of repeating the unchanged words, phrases, clauses, sentences along with their insensitivity towards the co-text and context. In conclusion, the breakdowns of syntactically establishing the other eight Antecedents and two Postcedents within the produced written discourses strongly confirm that these should be critically taken into account in the ELT and learning’s programs along with integrating them with the other linguistic studies of the Binding Theory, Discourse Analysis of Anaphora and Cataphora, and Pragmatic Studies of Exophora, Endophora and indexicals.