Subject and Predicate in the Thinking of the Arabic Philologists

The sine qua non of human speech is the sentence, whose function it is to express a complete ascriptive (nisha iamnma) between two terms, a subject-term and a predicate-term. The sentence structure itself is made up of two fundamentally different parts: a subject-expression and a predicate-expression. The nature of the difference between these two parts is a matter of considerable interest to the Arabic philologists. In the case of the verbal sentence, their analysis of the difference bears some similarity to P. F. Strawson's analysis with reference to the English sentence: whereas the subject-expression simply signifies a term, the predicate-expression (which, as in English, must always be a verb), in addition to signifying a term, also signifies the ascriptive linkage of that term to the term signified by the subject-expression. The analysis of the Arabic nominal sentence involves somewhat different considerations, and in the case of nominal sentences in which the predicate is a deinfinitival (rnushtaqq) noun-which bears a certain resemblance to the verb-the analysis becomes rather complex. The account of the thinking of the Arabic philologists on these subjects here set forth is intended to be provisional and provocative of further investigation

Arabic · Library science · Linguistics · Philology · Predicate (mathematical logic) · Programming language · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Computer Science · Education and Islamic Studies · Historical and Linguistic Studies · History · Philosophy

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