From Description to Prescription
The exceptive in Arabic grammatical theory
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3955131 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Hana Zabarah (Georgetown University in Qatar, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 135-163 |
| Publication date | 2017-08-03 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Historiographia Linguistica (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0302-5160 • E-ISSN: 1569-9781 |
| Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL) |
| DOI | 10.1075/hl.44.1.04zab |
| OpenAlex | W2613593504 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 13 |
Once the need to learn a language arises, grammatical instructional manuals evolve from descriptive grammars of that language. Language description involves the uncovering of the rules of the language from collected data, and teaching those rules is the reason grammatical manuals exist. The most comprehensive descriptive grammar of Arabic is Sībawayhi'sKitāb(d. ca.161-94 AH/777-810 A.D.). He includes the rules of Arabic as he deduced them from the language of the Arabs. As time passed and the need to learn Arabic increased, many grammarians started to write grammatical manuals for beginners. Sībawayhi's monumental work was too speculative and highly theoretical for this task and was never suitable for instruction. The descriptiveness of Sībawayhi'sKitābneeded to morph into a more approachable grammar. Zağğāğī'sĞumal(d. ca.337-340/948-951) and Ibn Bābašāḏ'sMuqaddima(d.469/1077) are two instructional manuals that are concise and more suitable for beginners. This study examines how pedagogy in Zağğāğī'sĞumaland Ibn Bābašāḏ'sMuqaddimaevolved from the descriptive rules of Sībawayhi'sKitābthrough a careful analysis ofistiṯnā'"exception" rules presented by each grammarian in this study. Although the rules are essentially the same in all three books, presentation and description or lack thereof are sufficiently different illustrating their distinct objectives
Arabic · Grammar · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Presentation (obstetrics · Computer Science · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis · Philosophy · Artificial Intelligence
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |