Grammarians and Grammatical Theory in the Medieval Arabic Tradition

Ramzi Baalbaki is Professor of Arabic at the American University of Beirut, the Lebanon

'Given that the papers, selected for the Variorum, span nearly a quarter of a century from 1979 to 2001, their great coherence, both methodological and thematic, is striking, so too is their impressively high scholarly standard... this Variorum volume represents a milestone in the study of both the history of Arabic grammar and one of the three branches of rhetoric, the science of the meanings. ...The author may justly be called one of the leading scholars in this field over the last quarter of a century, who excels by the precision of his methods and the value of his conclusions.' Journal of Islamic Studies

• Contents: Preface; Sibawayhi’s Kitab: The book in the grammatical tradition: development in content and methods; Some aspects of harmony and hierarchy in Sibawayhi’s grammatical analysis; A possible early reference to Sibawayhi’s Kitab?; A contribution to the study of technical terms in early Arabic grammar: the term asl in Sibawayhi’s Kitab; Coalescence as a grammatical tool in Sibawayhi’s Kitab. Grammarians and Related Disciplines: The treatment of qira’at by the 2nd and 3rd century grammarians; The relation between nahw and balaga: a comparative study of the methods of Sibawayhi and Gurgani; A balagi approach to some grammatical shawahid; Early Arab lexicographers and the use of Semitic languages; Kitab al-’ayn and Jamharat al-luga. Grammatical Theory: Arab grammatical controversies and the extant sources of the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.H.; Tawahhum: an ambiguous concept in early Arabic grammar; 'I’rab and bina’ from linguistic reality to grammatical theory; Reclassification in Arabic grammatical theory; Expanding the ma’nawi ’awamil: Suhayli’s innovative approach to the theory of regimen; The occurrence of 'insa’ instead of habar: the gradual formulation of a grammatical issue; Bab al-fa’ [fa’ + subjunctive] in Arabic grammatical sources; Teaching Arabic at university level: problems of grammatical tradition; Index.