First Published in 2000. This transformational analysis will greatly enrich the field of Arabic linguistics. While the majority of works on the Arabic language have concentrated on regional dialects, the present work fulfils a longfelt need by focusing on modern written or literary Arabic. Although literary Arabic is not used in casual conversation in any of the Arab countries, it is the formal and official form of the language and has great influence on the colloquial dialects, particularly those spoken by educated Arabs. Arranged in five chapters, the work gives particular emphasis to three major types of Arabic sentences the co-ordinate, the negative and the interrogative - and gives a generative account of them. The work is largely based on transformational theory as formulated by Chomsky, but reference is made to subsequent development in linguistic theory.

Investigates the universal categories 'subject', 'theme', and 'agent' with special reference to their functional status in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and how these three distinct functions may or may not coincide in Arabic sentences. These functions are inexplicitly characterised by classical and modern Arab linguists and Arabists alike. It has been found that the pre- (viz. sentence - initial) or post-verbal noun phrase (NP) in Arabic can be assigned the syntactic function 'subject' but may not necessarily assume the semantic function 'agent', that the pre-verbal NP, which may not necessarily be the 'subject', has the pragmatic function 'theme', and that these distinct functions sometimes cluster around a single NP in certain sentences, depending on genre. It has also been found that in MSA the order of sentence constituents is relatively free, subject to a verb-initial preference, especially when needed to prevent ambiguity. The present study reveals the fact that although coding features such as word order, case marking, and cross-referencing (viz. agreement) may provide a clear indication of which NPs are 'subjects' in MSA, they do not provide a clear-cut indication of semantic relations such as 'agent'; the 'subject' position in MSA is not necessarily the canonical 'agent' position.