Arabic Grammar and Linguistics

253 Pages·1999·4.44 MB·English

by  Yasir Suleiman

Arabic Grammar
and Linguistics
Arabic Grammar
and Linguistics
Edited by
Yasir Suleiman
R
Routledge
Taylor &. Francis Group
LONDON AND NEW YORK
DEDICATION
I dedicate this volume to the memory of
Sandor Hervey (1942-1997)
whose untimely death has deprived me of a true friend
and a fine colleague
First Published in 1999
by Routledge
Reprinted 2003
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park,
Abingdon, Oxon, 0X14 4RN
Transferred to Digital Printing 2006
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
Editorial Matter © 1999 Yasir Suleiman
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-7007-1007-8
Publisher’s Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint
but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent
CONTENTS
Names of Contributors...............................................................vii
Acknowledgments......................................................................viii
Introduction....................................................................................1
PART I: ARABIC GRAMMAR
1 Zayd Ibn ‘All's Commentary on the Qur'an.....................9
Kees Versteegh
2 Autonomy versus Non-Autonomy in the Arabic
Grammatical Tradition.......................................................30
Yasir Suleiman
3 Aspects of the Use of Grammatical Terminology
in Medieval Arabic Grammatical Tradition...................50
Yishai Peled
4 Coalescence as a Grammatical Tool in Sibawayhi's
Kitdb .....................................................................................86
Ramzi Baalbaki
5 The Syntactic Study of Mafiil Mutlaq: A Study in
Qur'anic Syntax........................................................................
Rafi Talmon
6 Modalities and Grammaticalization in Arabic.............107
Nadia Anghelescu
PART II: ARABIC LINGUISTICS and BEYOND
7 Vocatives as Exclamatory Nouns in Iraqi Arabic.......144
Farida Abu-Haidar
8 The Syntax of Arabic Headlines and News
Summaries..........................................................................161
Janet Watson
9 Semantic Considerations in the Syntactic
Structures of Complement Clauses in Modem
Literary Arabic..................................................................182
Maria Persson
10 Cross-Addressing: Reverse Gender Reference in
Spoken Cairene Arabic....................................................203
David Wilmsen
11 On Translating Palestinian Folk Tales:
Comparative Stylistics and the Semiotics of Genre....222
Ibrahim Muhawi
vi
NAMES OF CONTRIBUTORS
Farida Abu-Haidar
University of London
Nadia Anghelescu
University of Bucharest
Ramzi Baalbaki
American University of Beirut
Ibrahim Muhawi
University of Edinburgh
Yishai Peled
University of Tel Aviv
Maria Persson
University of Lund
Yasir Suleiman
University of Edinburgh
Rafi Talmon
University of Haifa
Kees Versteegh
University of Nijmegen
Janet Watson
University of Durham
David Wilmsen
American University in Cairo
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express my thanks and gratitude to Shahla,
Tamir and Sinan for all the love and support they gave me
during the editing of this book. I am grateful to Claire
Thomson for her help in producing the final version of this
volume. I am particularly grateful to all the contributors for
their co-operation.
Finally I am grateful to the Arts, Divinity and Music
Research Fund, University of Edinburgh for their financial
support in producing this volume.
Yasir Suleiman
Edinburgh, 15 June 1998
INTRODUCTION
Yasir Suleiman
In a paper published a decade ago, Carter (1988:217) makes an
impassioned plea to end the "artificial dichotomy" which exists
between what he calls "Arab linguistics", which we called by its
more usual name 'Arabic grammar' in the title of this volume,
and "Arabic linguistics" whose aim is to apply modem linguistic
theory to the study of the Arabic language in its standard and
dialectal manifestations. However, Carter is quick to remind us
that the rapprochement between these two approaches to the
study of the language must respect their theoretical integrity. Not
only is this a necessary condition for the fruitful cross­
fertilisation between these two modes of study, but it is also
important to avoid the temptation of trying to construct Arabic
grammatical theory in the image of modern linguistic
approaches, often in a violent or Procrustean fashion. As one
who started his career as a theoretical linguist, but later
developed an interest in the Arabic Grammatical Tradition
because of what it tells us about the "religion, thought, ideology
[and] aesthetics" of the Arabs (ibid.:206), I cannot but agree with
Carter's call to end the polarisation between Arab and Arabic
linguistics. In this context, complementarity, rather than
opposition or imposition, would be the order of the day. This
vision represents a major guiding principle in the present
compilation.
Some of the papers in this volume owe their genesis to a
conference entitled Arabic Grammar and Linguistics, which was
held in Edinburgh in August 1996 under the auspices of the
Edinburgh Institute for the Advanced Study of Islam and the
Middle East in its former incarnation as the Muir Institute.
Others were selected from a number of papers which were
solicited specifically for this volume. All the papers, however,
subscribe to the guiding principle articulated above. This is
reflected symbolically in the title of this book, in which the term
"Arabic" is used to qualify both "Grammar" and "Linguistics" at
one and the same time. In what follows we will give a broad
outline of the papers in this volume to help contextualise them in
relation to each other.
i
2 YASIR SULEIMAN
Interest in the formative impulses of the Arabic Grammatical
Tradition has been a predominant theme in Western scholarship
on the subject. Broadly speaking, views on the topic have varied
between those that sought to account for the rise of Arabic
grammar by reference to external factors, whether mediated or
not, whose roots lie in a foreign intellectual tradition, and those
which seek to locate the origins of Arabic grammar in its native
cultural environment. A middle position between these two
extremes exists, whereby the interaction between the external
and the home-grown is recognised. In his paper "Zayd Ibn ‘All's
Commentary on the Qur'an”, Kees Versteegh continues his
earlier research on the sources of Arabic grammar (cf. Versteegh
1993), in which he highlights the contribution of the indigenous
intellect to the development of this discipline by investigating a
corpus of early commentaries on the Qur'an. In the commentary
under consideration here this indigenous contribution is clear in
two areas: (a) in the use of technical terminologies whose
genesis lies in the early exegetical tradition, and (b) in the
interest in lexical phenomena which, strictly speaking, go
beyond the exegetical boundary of displaying the meaning of the
text of the Holy Qur'an.
The second paper by the editor of this volume deals with the
theoretical foundations of Arabic grammar by considering the
discipline from the view-point of the autonomy debate in modem
linguistic theory (Givon 1979 and Newmeyer 1986, 1995).
Combining a macro-perspective on the topic with a micro-
analytical treatment of selected texts from the Arabic
Grammatical Tradition, the paper seeks to exemplify the
occurrence of the two tendencies of autonomy and non­
autonomy in this tradition by investigating two areas: (a) the
relationship between grammar and its neighbouring disciplines,
and (b) the pragmatic function of grammar in its social milieu.
The author also makes the point that it is largely the concern
with autonomy which ensures the epistemological and
methodological integrity of Arabic grammar as a discipline in its
own right.
The third paper bridges the gap between the historical and the
theoretical, which constitute the primary concerns of the
preceding two papers respectively. In this paper Yishai Peled
concentrates on the emergence and development of technical
terminologies in Arabic grammar from their inceptual
beginnings as semantic extensions of everyday expressions to
their establishment as organisational currencies in a theoretical