Grammarians and Grammatical Theory in the Medieval Arabic Tradition

Professor Baalbaki deals here with the Arabic grammatical tradition and the analytical methods of the medieval Arab grammarians. The essays included open new perspectives on the most authoritative work on Arabic grammar, Sibawayhi's tome or Kitab, on the relation between grammatical study and other areas of linguistic enquiry such as Qur'anic readings and stylistics, and on the techniques which the grammarians employed to explain and rationalize usage and to incorporate within their system the vast body of dialectal material which the corpus comprises. The author has sought to highlight the central position which Arabic grammar enjoys within the wider Arab culture, and in so doing has examined several aspects of a legacy which has been revered over a millennium and which forms to this very day the backbone of the teaching of grammar in the Arab world.

Contents: Preface; Sibawayhi’s Kitab: The book in the grammatical tradition: development in content and methods; Some aspects of harmony and hierarchy in Sibawayhi’s grammatical analysis; A possible early reference to Sibawayhi’s Kitab?; A contribution to the study of technical terms in early Arabic grammar: the term asl in Sibawayhi’s Kitab; Coalescence as a grammatical tool in Sibawayhi’s Kitab. Grammarians and Related Disciplines: The treatment of qira’at by the 2nd and 3rd century grammarians; The relation between nahw and balaga: a comparative study of the methods of Sibawayhi and Gurgani; A balagi approach to some grammatical shawahid; Early Arab lexicographers and the use of Semitic languages; Kitab al-’ayn and Jamharat al-luga. Grammatical Theory: Arab grammatical controversies and the extant sources of the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.H.; Tawahhum: an ambiguous concept in early Arabic grammar; 'I’rab and bina’ from linguistic reality to grammatical theory; Reclassification in Arabic grammatical theory; Expanding the ma’nawi ’awamil: Suhayli’s innovative approach to the theory of regimen; The occurrence of 'insa’ instead of habar: the gradual formulation of a grammatical issue; Bab al-fa’ [fa’ + subjunctive] in Arabic grammatical sources; Teaching Arabic at university level: problems of grammatical tradition; Index.

Ramzi Baalbaki is Professor of Arabic at the American University of Beirut, the Lebanon