The Development of a Tradition: Continuity and Change

Présentations

Opening of the symposium by André Miquel, Sophie Vassilaki and Georgine Ayoub

KEYNOTE LECTURE - A twelfth century league table of Arab grammarians by Michael Carter

In his discussion of the meaning(s) and syntax of rubba “how many/how few”, the Andalusian grammarian Ibn al-Sīd al-Baṭalyawsī (d. 521/1127) declares his preference for the majority opinion, supported by a list of grammarians divided into “major and prominent Baṣrans” (kubarāʼ al-Baṣriyyīn wa-mašāhīruhum), “minor grammarians” (ṣiġār al-naḥwiyyīn) and “Kūfans” (undifferentiated Kūfiyyūn). Surprisingly he includes al-Zajjājī among the “minor grammarians”, even though his Jumal was one of the most widely read manuals in al-Andalus. This paper examines the grammarians in al-Baṭalyawsī’s list to see what light it throws on the history of Arabic grammatical theory in general and in al-Andalus in particular.

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Tribal and Cultural Identity and its Linguistic Reflection in the First Arabic Grammar by Amal Marogy

Kitāb Sībawayhi stands out not only as the starting point, but also as the most reliable source on early grammatical activity. However, the Kitāb goes far beyond pure description of linguistic phenomena with painstaking detail; Sībawayhi’s descriptive method is interwoven with social and cultural realities, and all the attestations in his Kitāb are records of the speech of the Arabs within their social and cultural context. In this paper, the first Arabic grammar is advanced as an invaluable eyewitness account of the social, tribal, cultural and religious identity in the eighth century Iraq. Kitāb Sībawayhi is shown to be a work that drew on local and regional mores in various ways whilst also exhibiting its own separate and distinguished character. When some unresolved problems associated with pre-Sībawayhian grammatical activity are viewed through the lens of history of the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Persia, Kitāb Sībawayhi can legitimately be viewed as the linguistic expression of the tribal, the non-tribal, and the multicultural identity in the early ʿAbbasid period.

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Speaker's knowledge in al-Sīrāfī (Sībawayhi commentary) and Ibn Sīnā by Manuela E.B. Giolfo and Wilfrid Hodges

Continuing our programme to compare the semantic ideas of al-Sīrāfī and Ibn Sīnā (Giolfo M, Hodges W (2013). Syntax and Meaning in Sīrāfī and Ibn Sīnā. ROMANO-ARABICA, vol. XIII, 2013, p. 97-116, ISSN: 1582-6953), we describe the discussion of indefiniteness in Ibn Sīnā’s treatment of quantifiers. The questions that he raises place him more with the linguists than the logicians, although his terminology is not standard in Arabic linguistics. We compare in detail with al-Sīrāfī’s discussion of the nakira.

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Samā‘ and Intuition in Ibn Jinnī's al-Khaṣā’iṣ by Noel A. Rivera

Since the emergence of Islam, Arabic philologists have attempted to address the ambiguities of the Arabic language. In order to do so, these philologists sought to compile a linguistic corpus that would facilitate the description and standardization of the language. The speech of the Arabs (kalām al-ʿarab) was one of the main sources of this Arabic linguistic corpus. Therefore, philologists ostensibly spent long periods of time in the desert of the Arabian Peninsula recording the speech of their Arab informants. The assumption was that the Arabs possessed a native intuition that allowed them to utilize the language flawlessly without any formal training. However, what did Arabic philologists mean by ‘native intuition’? What does it entail? Who exactly possesses this faculty? Is it something acquirable by anyone? In my paper, I seek to answer these questions and attempt to locate the role of this intuition in the general framework of attestation (samāʿ) as grammatical proof. I focus on the figure Ibn Jinnī (d.1002) and his work Al-Khaṣāʾiṣ. The goal of this study is to contribute to a better understanding of the epistemology of classical Arabic philological tradition.

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The grammatical and lexicographical traditions: Mutual foundations, divergent paths of development by Ramzi Baalbaki

The boundaries between naḥw (which includes ṣarf) and luġa are difficult to draw for the early stages of linguistic enquiry as of the second/eighth century. The affinity between the two disciplines, which sets them apart from other linguistically oriented domains, is not only dictated by the proximity of their subject matter, but also promoted by several factors which may be regarded as foundations common to both. Among these is that much of their material is derived from a common source, namely, the process of data collection that took place in the second half of the second/eighth century and the first few decades of the third/ninth. Furthermore, both the naḥwiyyūn and the luġawiyyūn were greatly interested in ġarīb (strange) and nādir (uncommon) material, mainly occurring in dialectal variants and poetry, particularly raǧaz. Ḫalīl’s profound influence on the founding principles of both disciplines as well as the impact of Sībawayhi’s Kitāb on the grammatical tradition are among the prime reasons for continuity in both traditions, despite certain features of development in subsequent grammatical and lexicographical works.

Thematic or mubawwab lexica share a considerable amount of material with grammatical works, as in the genres of al-muḏakkar wa-l-muʾannaṯ (masculine and feminine), al-maqṣūr wa-l-mamdūd (abbreviated and prolonged patterns), and al-abniya (patterns in general). Yet in these and several other genres the two disciplines followed divergent paths of development, resulting at times in a relationship of complementarity. The paper demonstrates how the authors of thematic lexica developed new perspectives in their study. Foremost among these are the genres devoted to the semantic dimension largely excluded by Sībawayhi and other grammarians, e.g. the study of mutarādif (synonyms), muštarak (homonyms), and aḍdād (words with two contradictory meanings). The genres of ġarīb al-Qurʾān and ġarīb al-Ḥadīṯ also complement the syntactic study of the grammarians by exploring the meanings of ġarīb words in the Qurʾān and Ḥadīṯ or of the meanings of commonly used words when they occur in a specific religious context. The two disciplines of naḥw and luġa are also shown to differ in the degree to which they admit Ḥadīṯ to their corpus and cite poetry šawāhid from the period following ʿuṣūr al-iḥtiǧāǧ, or epochs of reliable usage. On a broader scale, the paper concludes that unlike the Arabic grammatical theory — which has its own set of technical terms, notions and methods of analysis, and which inspects the methodological and epistemological issues it embraces — no discernible theory, either in the thematic lexica or the general lexica that exhaust the roots of the language, has been developed by the lexicographers.

Cristina Solimando and Giuliano Lancioni

Sībawayhi’s Kitāb clearly shows the seeds of a theory of valency: namely, chapters 10–17 classify verbs according to a series of patterns of agentivity, passivity, and so on. However, this approach is relatively neglected by later grammarians, who seem to prefer a more syntactic-bound view of government-related phenomena, in agreement with the general preference they give to ‘amal as a universal explicative factor. Our presentation will try to examine how the transition between these partially alternative views takes place in early grammarians through the seminal treatise by Ibn al-Sarrāj, Kitāb al-Uṣūl fī al-naḥw. In particular, relevant passages from such works as al-Farrāʾ’s Maʿānī al-Qurʾān, Mubarrad’s al-Muqtaḍab and the Kitāb al-Jumal (apocryphally) ascribed to al-Ḫalīl b. Aḥmad will be examined and discussed in order to ascertain how Sībawayhi’s model fades out and the ʿamal-centered approach — already well-represented in the Kitāb itself, but less important in discussion of valency, where verb classes in a semantic approach are prominent— gains momentum and becomes the standard explanation for argument-related phenomena.

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The Verb in Arab Grammatical Treatises: Conformity and Contradictions by Zeinab Taha

In their approach to presenting the verb’s qualities and its possible role in transitivity, Arab grammarians named several features of the Arabic verb and specified the role it played in transitivity. Some of those features were shared by the majority of Arab grammarians, while other features were the source of disagreement and discontinuity. Starting with Sibawayhi, and ending with Ibn Jinni, the structural, morphological and pragmatic qualities of verbs had been treated with varied emphasis on the power of the verb to hold its noun complements in its valence, the effect it exercised on the noun complements and the pragmatic meaning it conveyed.

Conformity and contradictions are both noticed with respect to the definition of what a verb is, the type of technical terms describing the role of the verb, the amount of emphasis on meaning in syntactic arguments, and the realm of transitivity.

The paper addresses the chronological development and presentation of these issues in early Arab grammatical writings and entertains several questions related to the possible causes for those different presentations.

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Early Pedagogical Grammars by Almog Kasher

In this paper several peculiar traits (specifically, terms and notions) will be discussed which occur in a number of early pedagogical grammatical treatises (tenth century at the latest). Its goal is twofold. First, it will be shown that not only are these traits incompatible with either the ‘Baṣran’ or the ‘Kūfan’ tenets, but also that some writers who made use of them were well aware of the discrepancy between these traits and the grammatical theories which these writers themselves adhered to; their use was sometimes explained as stemming from pedagogical considerations. Second, evidence will be furnished that at least some of the traits are probably not an innovation of these grammarians, but go back at least to the first half of the ninth century. It will be argued that these findings have methodological ramifications for the study of early pedagogical works.

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On the emergence of Arabic dictionary making in the 2nd and 3rd centuries H: al-Ḫalīl, Ibn Durayd, al-Jawharī by Joseph Dichy

It has to be assumed that the first comprehensive dictionaries in the history of mankind have been elaborated by Medieval Arabic scholars between the 2nd/8th and the 6th/12th cent., despite forerunning glossaries found in ancient cultures, particularly in Sanskrit, Chinese or Greek and Latin. As opposed to a glossary, a comprehensive dictionary aims at covering the entire vocabulary of a language, and presenting it in a set of manuscripts (or volumes). In the 2nd/8th cent., though, lexical comprehensiveness had never been achieved anywhere, and could subsequently hardly be imagined. It would even be deemed delusive.

Haywood, who remains a fundamental reference for Arabic lexicography, wrote in the late 1950’s that, were a Bagdad or Basra scholar from Abbassid times be carried through space and time to the British Museum, and shown, say, the twelve in-quarto volumes of the 1933 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, he would not have been surprised, because similarly comprehensive lexicons already existed in manuscript in his own times. In a previous contribution, I have endeavoured to shown how al-Ḫalīl Ibn Aḥmad al-Farāhīdī (d. around 175/791) paved the way, by the end of his life, to the making of later comprehensive Arabic dictionaries through establishing a consistent framework for the composition of his dictionary, the Kitāb al-‘Ayn. The story of the writing of that first Arabic dictionary is somewhat numbed with mystery, although recent analyses have highlighted the relations between al-Ḫalīl and his obscure Ḫūrasānī disciple, al-Layṯ, who seems to have completed the dictionary after the death of the Baṣrī master .

The preface of the Kitāb al-‘Ayn presents the framework devised by al-Ḫalīl for the elaboration of a comprehensive list of words, on the basis of two fundamental inventories, that of ‘letter-segments’ (ḥurūf) and that of ‘constructs’ (binā’). The mathematical mind of al-Ḫalīl allowed him to elaborate a method according to which the units of the latter finite inventories allowed exhaustive coverage of virtual ‘constructs’, some elements of which are ‘effective’ or ‘in use” (musta‘mal), and others are ‘un-effective’ (muhmal); in that effective words necessarily correspond to a subset of the virtual ones2.

The present contribution focuses on the way in which two major followers elaborated, in the 4th/10th century, other major comprehensive dictionaries:

• The Jamharat al-luġa, due to Ibn Durayd (d. 321/933), takes up the fundamentals of al-Ḫalīl’s method in covering the entire set of virtual ‘constructs’ , with a few differences that will be underlined. Ibn Durayd’s main original contribution lays in the way he accesses effective data, on the one hand, and tries to ‘define’ words through intuitive glosses on the other. He explicitly mentions, for instance, among others, Syrian usage (luġa šāmiyya).
• Al-Ṣiḥāḥ (or al-Ṣaḥāḥ), due to Ismā’īl bn Ḥammād al-Jawharī (d. 398/1007), was elaborated by its author during the years when he had to flee to Arabia – for political reasons –, and live among the tribes he originated from. While Ibn Durayd drew lexical information from Arabic speakers living in Iraq (hence the observation according to which an expression or word could be of ‘Syrian usage’), al-Jawharī based his own information on in situ observation in Arabia – a point of comparison that requires further discussion. He also modified the order of the dictionary, which became based on the last letter of what we call a root. This point also needs to be considered in some detail: al-Jawharī is one of the first Arabic lexicographers, if not the first, who has introduced an easier ‘look up’ order (known among western Arabists as a ‘rime order’), as opposed to the heuristic order of al-Ḫalīl, Ibn Durayd or Ibn Fāris (d. 395/1005), which we’ll endeavour to explain.

Other later lexicographers could of course be mentioned and analysed. The present contribution focuses on some aspects of the emergence of Arabic lexicography, to which we owe such a great collection of rich and precise dictionaries.

1. John A. Haywood, Arabic Lexicography. Its History and its Place in the general History of Lexicography, Leiden, Brill, 1960

2. Dichy J., “Al-Ḫalīl’s Conjecture: how the First Comprehensive Dictionary in History was invented”, in Giolfo, Manuella (ed.), Arab and Arabic Linguistics: Traditional and New Theoretical Approaches, (Journal of Semitic Studies Supplement Series). Oxford University Press, Oxford 2013, p. 39-64

3. Gregor Schœler, Écrire et transmettre aux débuts de l’Islam, Paris, PUF, 2002.

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KEYNOTE LECTURE - What Is Meant by ḥāl Muqaddara? by Aryeh Levin

This paper proposes to discuss the sense and the historical development of the term ḥāl muqaddara, which denotes one of the sub-categories of the syntactic phenomenon called al-ḥāl. Although this term originates in grammatical texts between the ninth and the twelfth centuries,it becomes a defining term only later, in works of the fourteenth century where it is briefly mentioned.

The concept of the early grammarians of the phenomenon of ḥāl muqaddara differs from that of the later ones.

Reckendorf and Wright accept the later grammarians’concept of this syntactic phenomenon.

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Case and reference: mā lā yanṣarif in Sībawayhi’s Kitāb by Georgine Ayoub

The Kitāb of Sībawayhi devotes 31 chapters to treat the nouns that have only two terminations to indicate case, what is known for us as diptotism. Hardly a particular topic of grammar has been as systematic in the Kitāb and has been presented with as much detail. One need only compare with the erratic treatment of important theories as transitivity, ellipsis or tense.

Actually, the theory of mā lā yanṣarif deserves particular attention. It is at the heart of the grammar of Sībawayhi, as its principles are at the crossroads of important postulates and sub-theories of the Kitāb. Ultimately, this theory illustrates the unique way Sībawayhi, and after him, the Arabic grammatical tradition, link formal considerations – declension – with semantic and pragmatic theories, more precisely the declension of nouns with their reference. This presentation seeks precisely to examine this link. Some of the debates about this theory, before and after Sībawayhi, will be examined too.

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Demonstratives in Sībawayhi’s Kitāb and later grammatical treatises by Arik Sadan

Many phonetic, morphological and syntactic features in Sībawayhi’s Kitāb have attracted researchers’ attention in the last centuries. One of the less treated issues is Sībawayhi’s use and views of the roles of demonstratives in the Arabic language he describes. Electronic editions of Sībawayhi’s Kitāb now enable us to trace and analyze every instance of demonstrative in this important treatise. Sībawayhi’s use of demonstratives in his Kitāb can be divided into three groups: (1) demonstratives in example sentences; (2) demonstratives as a morphological or syntactic subject that is discussed and explained; and (3) demonstratives used in other contexts, simply as words that are parts of sentences, just as other nouns, verbs, etc. In this paper, I would like to examine the first two groups, as follows:

(1) Interesting instances of demonstratives are in example sentences, which Sībawayhi adduces for various phenomena. Examining such example sentences and analyzing them may supply us with Sībawayhi’s perception of demonstratives and their syntactic and semantic roles in the language. For example, it is obvious that for Sībawayhi, demonstratives are good examples for non-verbal elements with the syntactic and semantic characteristics of verbs, as in the example hāḏā ʿAbdullāhi ḥaqqan “watch, here is ʿAbdallāh, truly” of the phenomenon later known by al-ḥāl al-muʾakkida, which is discussed in chapter 88 of the Kitāb.

(2) Sībawayhi’s treatment and analysis of demonstratives morphologically and syntactically can, of course, also shed light on his views on demonstratives’ functions in Arabic.

To conclude, this paper aims at examining Sībawayhi’s usages and treatment of demonstratives in his Kitāb, analyzing them and reaching conclusions as to his perception of demonstratives and their roles in the Arabic language. Next to examining Sībawayhi’s Kitāb, other principal later grammatical treatises will be consulted and compared to the Kitāb.

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Blind spots in Raḍī al-Dīn al-Astarābāḏī's grammar of numerals by Jean Druel

Grammar of numerals is a complicated chapter in classical Arabic treatises because it lies at the junction of many grammatical rules. In his Kitāb, Sībawayh (d. 180/796?) analyses numerals as a category of substantives that resemble the adjectives that themselves resemble active participles, aiming at a deep consistency between all grammatical rules. In the Muqtaḍab, al-Mubarrad (d. 285/898) visibly prefers to collect as many peculiar cases as possible where numerals are involved, renouncing consistency at a wider scale. And in his Uṣūl, Ibn al-Sarrāǧ (d. 316/928) creates a specific grammatical category for numerals, systematising a trend initiated by al-Mubarrad and initialising a way of analysing grammar that seems to be predominent until present day in the grammar of numerals.

What has grammar of numerals become in later grammarians? Did they refine Ibn al-Sarrāǧ's systematic and exhaustive subdivisions? In this paper I intend to explore Raḍī al-Dīn al-Astarābāḏī's (d. 686/1287?) grammar of numerals in order to understand how he deals with this complicated chapter of Arabic grammar. Each theory has its blind spots, i.e., assumptions that make vision possible but that are not questioned per se. Can we infer Raḍī al-Dīn al-Astarābāḏī's blind spots in his grammar of numerals? Could he escape Ibn al-Sarrāǧ's blind spots?

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Learning Arabic in the Islamic World by Kees Versteegh

In the transmission of Islamic knowledge in Africa, South Asia and South-east Asia, the language of religious instruction was often not Arabic. The role of Arabic was limited to the recitation of the Qurʾān and the ḥadīṯ; passive knowledge of Arabic was trained by collective reading of (often short) treatises in the classroom, which were memorized with the help of interlinear translations, e.g. in Swahili, in Persian, in Urdu, or in Malay.

This suggests that the role of Arabic grammar was indeed not very large. Yet, in most Islamic countries Arabic grammar was taught, so that students could at least attain an elementary knowledge of the language, and a few students could even progress towards independent reading of Arabic-written religious literature, such as Qurʾānic commentaries or even larger works, such as al-Ġazzālī's ʾIḥyāʾ.

For the instruction in Arabic grammar students needed textbooks. We do not know in detail what textbooks were available in which curriculum, and we do not know either whether there were large regional differences, for instance between the Islamic East and West, or whether there were major changes in the curriculum over time. There are, however, a few sources about madrasa training in various countries. In this paper I intend to find out what the canon for grammatical treatises was in the different parts of the Islamic world, and to go into the contents of the textbooks to see what grammatical ideas students actually learned from them. The main question remains of course, how one can learn a foreign language like Arabic by memorizing a grammatical treatise like the ʾAlfiyya, which presupposes a large amount of grammatical knowledge!

Bibliographical references

Baker, Philip. 1996. "The potential for the development of Arabic-based and other contact languages along the maritime trade routes between the Middle East and China, from the start of the Christian era". Atlas of languages of intercultural communication in the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas, ed. by Stephen A. Wurm, Peter Mühlhäusler, and Darrell T. Tryon, 637-72. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Berg, Lodewijk Willem Christiaan van den. 1886. "Het Mohammedaansche godsdienstonderwijs op Java en Madoera en de daarbij gebruikte Arabische boeken [The Mohammedan religious education in Java and Madura and the Arabic books used in it]". Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 31.518-555.

Boogert, Nico van den. 1997. The Berber literary tradition of the Sous with an edition and translation of 'The Ocean of tears' by Muḥammad Awzal (d. 1749). Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten.

Brenner, Louis. 2001. Controlling knowledge: Religion, power, and schooling in a West African Muslim society. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press Sartori

Bruinessen, Martin van. 1994. "Pesantren and kitab kuning: Continuity and change in a tradition of religious learning". Texts from the islands: Oral and written traditions of Indonesia and the Malay world, ed. by Wolfgang Marschall, 121-146. Berne: The University of Berne Institute of Ethnology.

Drewes, Gerard W.J. 1971. "The study of Arabic grammar in Indonesia". Acta orientalia neerlandica: Proceedings of the Congress of the Dutch Oriental Society, ed. by Pieter Willem Pestman, 61-70. Leiden: E.J. Brill.

Fragner, Bert G. 2006. "Das Persische als Hegemonialsprache in der islamischen Geschichte: Überlegungen zur Definition eines innerislamischen Kulturraums". Turkic-Iranian contact areas: Historical and linguistic aspects, ed. by Lars Johanson and Christiane Bulut, Christiane, 39-48. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Loimeier, Roman. 2009. Between social skills and marketable skills: The politics of Islamic education in 20th century Zanzibar. Leiden: E.J. Brill.

Sartori, Manuel. 2013. Le Šarḥ al-Kāfiyat de Ibn al-Ḥāǧib: Edition critique d'un manuscrit grammatical arabe du viie/xiiie siècle. Thèse de doctorat, Université de Provence.

Versteegh, Kees. 2011. "An Afrikaans footnote to the history of Arabic grammar: Sheikh Ismail Ganief's grammar of Arabic (ca. 1958)". In the shadow of Arabic: The centrality of language to Arabic culture. Studies presented to Ramzi Baalbaki on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, ed. by Bilal Orfali, 177-194. Leiden: E.J. Brill.

Wagner, Daniel A. 1993. Literacy, culture, and development: Becoming literate in Morocco. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Zadeh, Travis. 2012. The vernacular Qurʾān: Translation and the rise of Persian exegesis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Archaeology and Origin of the Term Taḫṣīṣ in Arabic Grammar by Manuel Sartori

I will look in my contribution on the technical term taḫṣīṣ. Never be a chapter or even a section, it is mentioned, when it is, only incidentally. This is the case both in Arabic and Arabist grammars, old as new. It is on the contrary oftenly used by Ibn al-Ḥāğib (d. 646/1249), who first drew my attention to this term. He did particularly in the comment he made of his own Kāfiya fī al-naḥw, commentary entitled al-ʾImlāʾ ʿalā al-Kāfiya.

But taḫṣīṣ is often ignored by the Arabist grammars. I begin then by defining the technical sense of the term crossing Arabist and Arab sources from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Then I lead the archeology of taḫṣīṣ to define to define precisely when, in the history of Arabic grammar, this term or one of its derivatives appears with its precise technical meaning. Finally, I assess how the term taḫṣīṣ can be an import made toward grammar from law sciences where this category seems to be treated independently while it is subject to absent developments in grammar. In doing so, like what Pierre Larcher did in Larcher in many artices (1990, 1991, 1992, 1994: not. 276-78, 1998 and 2007) around the concept of ʾinšāʾ by showing how it was a postclassical innovation from an external and peripheric discipline to grammar, I try to reconstruct the history of the category of taḫṣīṣ.

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Semantics in Šarḥ al-Kāfiya by Raḍī al-Dīn al-’Astarābāḏī: the notion of waḍ‘ by Beata Sheyhatovitch

Raḍī al-Dīn al-’Astarabāḏī (d. 1289) was a highly perceptive and original grammarian, whose contribution to the medieval Arabic grammatical theory remains to be fully appreciated. In my paper I elucidate some of ’Astarabāḏī’s insights, by focusing on the term waḍ‘ (lit. ‘laying down/placing’), which is one of the central concepts in his semantic discussions. The term refers to the act of instituting a linguistic form for a certain concept/idea/function, and I choose to render it as ‘coinage’. This concept evolved in discussions on the origin of language, mostly by theologians and jurists.

A few appearances of the term waḍ‘ and its derivatives can be found in early grammarians’ writings; but they are sporadic and do not seem to express principles on which arguments can be built. In contrast, ’Astarabāḏī defines the term at an early stage of his Šarḥ al-Kāfiya, and uses it in almost every major discussion. He uses the idea of the function and/or meaning for which the linguistic element was coined, in order to explain its syntactic and morpho-phonological behavior. My paper presents various types of elements that are coined, in the view of ’Astarabāḏī: morpheme, single word, proper noun and syntactical construction, and discusses different phenomena that are explained by the concept of waḍ‘: word order, definiteness, case marks, transitiveness, etc. Following that, I present three modes of denotation discerned by ’Astarabāḏī. Denotation by the virtue of coining is one of them, while the other two are “by nature” (ṭab‘an) and “by the means of reason” (‘aqlan). Finally, I explore the intricate relationship between waḍ‘ and 'isti‘māl (‘usage’) as it was perceived by ’Astarabāḏī’.

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How have the descriptions of taḥḏīr changed in connection with ’amr and nahy? by Haruko Sakaedani

The purpose of the paper is to go over changes in the descriptions of taḥdīr in Arabic linguistics.

Sībawaihi defined taḥḏīr in his Kitāb as ’īyā-[pronoun] + wa-[objective], and Ibn ‘Aqīl mentions ’iġrā’ when he refers to taḥḏīr in his ’Alfiyyah. Recently, ‘Abbās Ḥasan juxtaposed taḥḏīr with ’amr and nahy in an-Naḥw al-Wāfī. Some people say that these issues might be viewed from the perspective of khabar and ’inšā’. This paper is intended to serve as an investigation of the diachronic expansion of the meaning of Taḥḏīr in relationship to ’Amr, Nahy, and other similar concepts.

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General conclusions by Georgine Ayoub