Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and symbols used in this book
- 1 Arabic linguistics: overview and history
- 2 Arabic phonology
- 3 Arabic phonotactics and morphophonology
- 4 Arabic syllable structure and stress
- 5 Introduction to Arabic morphology
- 6 Derivational morphology: the root/pattern system
- 7 Non-root/pattern morphology and the Arabic lexicon
- 8 Arabic inflectional morphology
- 9 Syntactic analysis and Arabic
- 10 Arabic syntax I: phrase structure
- 11 Arabic syntax II: clause structure
- Appendix A Fields of linguistics and Arabic
- Appendix B Arabic transcription/transliteration/romanization
- Appendix C Arabic nominal declensions
- Glossary of technical linguistic terms
- References
- Index
- References
11 - Arabic syntax II: clause structure
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and symbols used in this book
- 1 Arabic linguistics: overview and history
- 2 Arabic phonology
- 3 Arabic phonotactics and morphophonology
- 4 Arabic syllable structure and stress
- 5 Introduction to Arabic morphology
- 6 Derivational morphology: the root/pattern system
- 7 Non-root/pattern morphology and the Arabic lexicon
- 8 Arabic inflectional morphology
- 9 Syntactic analysis and Arabic
- 10 Arabic syntax I: phrase structure
- 11 Arabic syntax II: clause structure
- Appendix A Fields of linguistics and Arabic
- Appendix B Arabic transcription/transliteration/romanization
- Appendix C Arabic nominal declensions
- Glossary of technical linguistic terms
- References
- Index
- References
Summary
Clauses in Arabic
Clauses are centered structurally and systematically around the predicate, and the predicative essence of a clause is what distinguishes it from a phrase. In Arabic syntax, there are verbal sentences and verbless (equational) sentences, and predicates may be of almost any lexical category: verbs (daras-naal-kitaab-a ‘We studied the book’), pronouns (haadhaahuwa ‘This is he’), prepositional phrases (al-kitaab-ufii l-maŧbax-i ‘The book is in the kitchen’), adjectives (al-bayt-ukabiir-un ‘The house is big’), or nouns (haaʔulaaʔiŧullaab-un ‘These are students’). Thus although verbs are at the heart of most predications, because the verb ‘to be’ in Arabic does not surface in the present tense indicative, other syntactic categories may bear the predicate or copular function in equational sentences.
Traditional Arabic grammars often classify sentence-types according to the first word in the sentence (noun or verb – jumla ismiyya/jumla fiʕliyya, ‘noun-sentence’/ ‘verb-sentence’), but the division is also viewed alternatively, according to whether or not the sentence contains an overt verb at all. Verbless sentences are considered a distinct linguistic category and usually referred to in English as “equational” sentences, with a basic predication distinction between the “topic” component (al-mubtadaʔ) and the “comment” component (al-xabar).
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- Information
- ArabicA Linguistic Introduction, pp. 127 - 140Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014