Module Outline: The Arabic Grammatical Tradition

2014

The conflicts between schools of grammar among Arab traditional grammarians indicated that the differences on intellectual approaches occurred in modifying the Arabic Grammar system. For example that the Basra school used the philosophy and logic approaches in their analyzing, critique, modifying and replacing the system in Arabic Grammar. Otherwise, the Kufa school more concentrated on reading Holy Quran, Hadith and Arabic poetry such as Asim bin Abi Nujud, Hamzah Zayyat and Kisaai whose from Qura` Sab`ah among the thinkers of the school worked on informant sources meant they associated with something unexpected or different what normally happens. The views above had been discussed and clarified by some researchers, historians, linguists and grammarians that Basra school based on analogy and the Kufa school on anomaly approach. However, this research aims to verify the approach of Basra and Kufa schools in order to investigate their principles in implementing the linguistic argumentation.

2011

Abū al-Qāsim az-Zama ẖ s ar ī’s (1075–1144) grammatical treatise Al-Mufaṣṣal fī ṣan‘at al-i‘rāb is one of the main and most acknowledged philological masterpieces of the classical Arabic. The aim of this article is to shed some light on its origin, cultural and philological background, main goals and assumptions of the author, its position in the history of studies on Arabic grammar, hitherto prevailing research output of European orientalist dealing with Al-Mufaṣṣal. It also comprises a short presentation of the figure of Az-Zama ẖ s ar ī himself. The article quotes references to Arabic, English, German, Russian and Polish source literature.

This study aims to critically examine IgnazGolziher’s allegations on the beginnings of Arabic linguistics. According to him, the Arabic short vowel symbols did not originate in the Arab world but were adopted from the Levant. The same he assumed in regard to the three different parts of speech, namely name (ism), verb (fiÑil), and particle (harf), which allegedly presupposed the knowledge of Aristotle’s De Interpretations falsely attributed to ÑAli (Karramallahuwajhah) . Goldziher explained this connection with the scholastic disputes occurring between the different theological schools in the first century AH, with special reference to the dogmatic differences between the Murji´ah and the Qadariyyah sects. Theological debates on various doctrines were held at the same time by Eastern Christians based on the teachings of John of Damascus. In the eyes of Goldziher, these debates – based on the assumption that since they occurred in the same century – they had to be related, and furthermore, St. John of Damascus must have borrowed his ideas from Aristotle. Since no Arabic sources speak of this connection, he raises his own suspicions, namely that Muslim sources refused to admit the borrowing of ideas from the Christians. This study serves the purpose of investigating his allegations in regard to the origin of Arabic grammar and syntax and of deciding the extent of his scholarly bias. The researcher adopts a theoretical and analytical approach based on linguistic studies. In order to arrive at a balanced judgment with regard to this conflict, the linguistic corpus, as well as the historical background of transmission is being analyzed.

2021

In the classical period, nahwu science books' work is not like the present one, which was more tiered in discussion and compiled in its study chapter. Sibawah's book (180 H.) titled Al-Kitab becomes the primary reference for nahwu in each generation. One effort to renew the work of nahwu after the Sibawaih era was Ibn Madha al-Qurthubi (596 H.) titled Ar-Rad 'ala an-Nuhat. This study aims to determine the extent of classical nuhat (Nahwu linguists) efforts to renew nahwu science in his book from various perspectives. This study is a qualitative research literature research with descriptive analysis in Ibn Madha's and Ar-Rad 'ala an-Nuhat book as research data. The reforms made by Ibn Madha include (1) eliminating 'amil inspired by Ibn Jinni, who considered the discussion of 'amil out of the discussion of language and irrationality; (2) eliminating illat; (3) rejecting qiyas; and (4) takwil in Arabic nahwu science. Ibn Madha's thought of renewing was influenced by the Madhhab Az-Zhahiriyah he followed and impacted his nahwa thoughts. It proves that ideological thinking influences its owner's rationality of the language thinking theory.

English Language and Literature Studies. Bi-annual Journal of the English Dept. Ain Shams University, May. Vol. IV, no I., 2005

This paper examines some focal aspects of functional grammar. It compares notions like meanings in grammar, thematic structures, transitivity, processes, participants, etc., in both English and Classical Arabic grammars. The former is represented by Halliday's (1994) seminal work "An Introduction to Functional Grammar"; the latter in the works of Ibn Ya'iish; Sibawayh, Ibn Ginni and others. Arabic Grammarians were preoccupied with semantico-syntactic issues, because of their concern with the application of rules to texts, or rather the re-interpretation of texts through their rules. Their works abound with examples from the Qur'an, pre-Islamic and Islamic poetry to support their arguments. Moreover, their grammatical proposals that are related to semantic aspects are clearly manifested in their classifications of processes, participants, thematic structures and their concern with meaning in texts. The aim of the paper is to highlight the similarities between these approaches to grammar, and to underline the importance of the methodologies and the procedures followed by old Classical Arabic grammarians. The study reveals that Arabs discussed elements and items of functional grammar and discourse analysis hundreds of years earlier than Halliday. Hence, the paper pays tribute to Arab grammarians who could be considered as pioneers in the above-mentioned issues; since they put forth their proposals centuries before their English counterparts.

International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences

Syntax is the study of sentence structures. Many studies of Arabic sentences adopt traditional grammatical methods, and less so methods in modern linguistics. This study aims to (i) identify the themes of previous studies related to the analysis of Arabic sentence structures; (ii) detect gaps found in previous studies of Arabic sentence structures; and (iii) highlight issues that can be used as new studies in the future. This study reviews literature on Arabic sentence structures reported in theses, dissertations, journals, books and seminar proceedings. The major themes emerge from this review: (i) Dominant sentence pattern in Arabic structure; (ii) Syntactical elements (iii) The results of the study on sentence construction showed that the dominant form of Arabic sentences was studied by twelve researchers, sentence elements were studied by ten researchers, sentence pattern issues were studied by five researchers, while discussion on sentence construction changes was conducted by three researchers. This study found that the type of sentence that is important for the study is the fi'liyyah type sentence, based on this type of sentence is the dominant sentence and the Arabic language is dominated by the fi ' liyyah sentence pattern. The focus of the type of fi ' liyyah sentence is the passive sentence. It is found that there are many aspects of syntactic structure of passive sentences have not been explained, especially through the latest language theory.