The Clause in the Works of the Traditional Arabic Grammarians

Abstract

For a long time the clause in the Arabic language was not treated as a particular topic by Arabic grammarians. The clause was dealt with mainly in chapters discussing words as simple syntactic units (mufradāt). It is believed that Ibn Hišām (d. 761/1360) was the first to understand the importance of the study thereof having dedicated a special chapter to the clause in his works Muġnī al-labīb ‘an kutub al-a‘arīb and Šarh Muqaddima al-i‘rāb. However, Ibn Hišām himself did not go further than collecting what had already been written about the clause.

At the beginning of grammar study, Arabic grammarians did not use any special term to denote the clause as a separate syntactic structure. It is believed that al-Fārisī (d. 377/987) was the first to define kalām and ğumla as formal grammatical units. Nor does al-Fārisī point out explicitly the difference between the terms kalām and ğumla; from the meaning of these units it is possible to understand that they are two different grammatical units.

Only much later did Ibn Hišām explicitly present the difference between the two terms pointing out that "kalām stands for the utterance with a full meaning after which we can stop, while ğumla is an utterance consisting of a verb (fi‘l) and its agent (fā‘il), the subject (mubtada’) and its predicate (kabar)" respectively and, therefore, does not always express full and independent meaning.

Besides the introduction of the term ğumla to denote a clause, for Arabic grammarians it was especially important to define the clause itself. According to them, the clause implies the existence of a predicative relation (isnad) between the subject and the predicate which, in a two-part analysis of the clause, are denoted as musnad (comment) and musnad ilayh (object). They are two basic constituents of a clause (‘umda al-ğumla), irrespective of the fact whether two nouns or a verb and a noun participate in the formation of such a clause. All other elements present in a clause are defined as parts added to the clause (fadla).

For Arabic grammarians, defining the term predication was significant, which, in their interpretation, meant connecting two words so that they together express a full and single meaning after which it is recommendable to make a pause. Possibilities of inversion of words (taqdīm wa ta’kīr) and omission of words (harf), inter alia, are given as the basic characteristics of the Arabic clause.

Traditional Arabic grammarians engaged in the classification of clauses by several different criteria. The basic clause classification, according to Arabic grammarians, is based on the grammatical parts of speech which are in the position of the subject (musnad ilayh) and the comment (musnad), i.e. of the subject and the predicate in a clause. By this criterion, clauses are classified into noun (ğumal ismiyya) and verbal (ğumal fi‘liyya) ones. Arabic grammarians classify clauses in a specific way, according to composition, into minimal (ğumal sugrā) and maximal clauses (ğumal kubrā) on the one side, and the ones belonging neither to maximal or minimal clauses, on the other. According to function, Arabic grammarians classify clauses into clauses of statement (ğumal kabariyya) and creative clauses (ğumal inšā’iyya). Particular classification of clauses in Arabic grammar is based on the syntactic function that a simple clause may have in a complex sentence. By this principle, a simple clause in a complex sentence may express the meaning of a single word so that a corresponding single word may come instead of it, and the simple clause which does not express the meaning of a single word, in which case a single word may not come instead of such a clause. The former type of these clauses is determined as clauses which have flexion according to the syntactic function they have in a complex sentence (ğumal lahā mahall min al-i‘rāb), and the latter as clauses which do not have flexion concerning the syntactic function they have in a complex sentence (ğumal lā mahall lahā min al-i‘rāb). Arabic grammarians treat narrative clauses as a special type of clauses (ğumal mahkiyya) which in the form of direct and indirect speech follow the verb قَالَ and the forms derived from it in the narrative meaning.