Qarinat al-Siyaq wa-Dawruha fi al-Taqid al-Nahwi wa-al-Tawjih al-Irabi fi Kitab Sibawayh
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- Qarinat al-Siyaq wa-Dawruha fi al-Taqid al-Nahwi wa-al-Tawjih al-Irabi fi Kitab Sibawayh
Qarinat al-Siyaq wa-Dawruha fi al-Taqid al-Nahwi wa-al-Tawjih al-Irabi fi Kitab Sibawayh (The Clue of Context and Its Role in Grammatical Rule-Making and Syntactic Parsing in Sibawayh's Book) is a doctoral dissertation in Arabic linguistics by the Egyptian scholar Ihab Abd al-Hamid Abd al-Sadiq Salama . The study examines how contextual evidence (qarinat al-siyaq) influenced the pioneer grammarian Sibawayh in formulating grammatical rules (al-taqid al-nahwi) and directing syntactic parsing (al-tawjih al-i'rabi) within his foundational work, al-Kitab .
Background and Purpose
The dissertation was submitted to the Department of Arabic Language at the Faculty of Women for Arts, Sciences, and Education at Ain Shams University, supervised by Amira Ahmad Yusuf and Hasana al-Zahhar . The research was prompted by observations made by the linguist Abd al-Rahman al-Hajj Salih regarding Sibawayh's acute attention to discourse circumstances and the state of the addressee (ahwal al-khitab wa-al-mukhatab), pointing to an intrinsic connection between context and grammatical theory that later grammarians often overlooked .
The author aims to establish that Sibawayh did not derive his rules merely from written texts or rigid theoretical constructs, but primarily from living, spoken Arabic utterances, making situational context (siyaq al-hal)—particularly the dynamics between the speaker (al-mutakallim) and the listener (al-mukhatab)—a fundamental factor in his grammatical reasoning .
Structure and Contents
The work is organized into an introduction (tamhid) and five core chapters :
- Introduction (al-Tamhid): Provides a biographical overview of Sibawayh and his Kitab, defines key operational terms (such as siyaq, ta'qid, tawjih, asl, ghalib, kathir, qalil, da'if, shadhdh, and radi'), and surveys the evidentiary text corpus relied upon by Sibawayh, which primarily comprised poetry, Quranic verses, Hadith, and Arabic proverbs .
- Chapter 1: Context and Methodology in Sibawayh's Work (al-Siyaq wa-al-Manhaj 'ind Sibawayh): Details Sibawayh's reliance on spoken utterances and contextual awareness, delineating his pre-formulation methodology into four sequential steps: classifying language into abstract pattern structures, statistical enumeration of patterns, tracking structures across varying contexts, and directly engaging with living speech .
- Chapter 2: The Role of Context in Syntactic Parsing (Dawr al-Siyaq fi al-Tawjih al-Irabi): Explores how context validates otherwise anomalous structures, provides referents for ambiguous pronouns, and enriches semantic and syntactic possibilities based on speaker intent, psychological state, and listener awareness, allowing Sibawayh interpretive freedom (al-tawjih al-hurr) whenever ambiguity is absent .
- Chapter 3: The Role of Context in Grammatical Rule-Making (Dawr al-Siyaq fi al-Taqid al-Nahwi): Analyzes the influence of context across five grammatical domains: nominal sentences (including subject-predicate relations and ellipsis), verbal sentences, appositives (al-tawabi'), syntactic styles (al-asalib), and grammatical particles (al-adawat) .
- Chapter 4: Context and Morphological Rules (al-Siyaq wa-al-Qawa'id al-Sarfiyya): Covers the contextual conditioning of morphological features, specifically the temporal values of verbs, the semantics of verbal nouns (masadir) and derived forms (mushtaqqat), and the nuanced meanings of morphological patterns (awzan) .
- Chapter 5: Context, Sibawayh, and Grammatical Theory (al-Siyaq wa-Sibawayh wa-al-Nazariyya al-Nahwiyya): Discusses the conceptual definition of grammatical theory and calls for revisiting traditional operator theory (nazariyyat al-'amil) to construct an Arabic syntactic framework anchored in contextual linguistics .
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