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Medieval Arabic grammarians are never at a loss when it comes to exhibiting examples that purportedly illustrate the relevance of the desinential inflection (iʿrāb), even when pushing rationalism to the extreme. This article discusses a good example of this in Sībawayhi’s Kitāb who, when dealing with the different possibilities in terms of inflection of the noun phrase waḥdahu associated with waḥduhu and waḥdihi, demonstrates such a grammatical rationalism by dividing the linguistic reality in such an ideal manner that it becomes specious, but also by going beyond the strict framework of the relevance of declension to suggest that it can distinguish between different meanings within the same linguistic variant.
Abstract
The Arabic grammar is mainly concerned with ʾiʿrāb (“inflection endings”). However, medieval Arabic grammarians are not so deaf, taking into account prosody as well. This is what this article shows on the basis of the difference to be made between badal (“permutative, substitution”) and ʿaṭf al-bayān (“explanatory apposition”). If the badal is described as being the essential term in relation to the term to which it is apposed, within the framework of a referential uniqueness existing between the two, the ʿaṭf al-bayān is only an accessory term coming to specify the identity of term to which it is apposed within the framework of a referential multiplicity of the latter. This semantic and pragmatic dichotomy opposing referential uniqueness to referential multiplicity in fact induces another criterion of distinction which is neither distributional nor inflectional (therefore syntactic), nor even semantic and pragmatic, but suprasegmental. It turns out that medieval Arabic grammarians, if we do listen to them, are aware of these suprasegmental criteria: this article will show that the badal is a loose apposition while the ʿaṭf al-bayān is a close apposition.