This book presents a comprehensive portrait of the Kitāb Sībawayhi. It offers new insights into its historical and linguistic arguments and underlines their strong correlation. The decisive historical argument highlights al-Ḥīra’s role, not only as the centre of pre-Islamic Arabic culture, but also as the matrix within which early Arab linguistics grew and developed. The Kitāb’s value as a communicative grammar forms the crux of the linguistic argument. The complementarity of syntax and pragmatics is established as a condition sine qua non for Sībawayhi’s analysis of language. The benefits of a complementary approach are reflected in the analysis of nominal sentences and related notions of ibtidā’ and definiteness. The pragmatic principle of identifiability is uncovered as the ultimate determiner of word order.

Qur’anic idiomaticity, in its all aspects, poses a great deal of challenge to Qur’an readers, learners, commentators, and translators. One of the most challenging aspects of Qur’anic idiomaticity is Qur’anic idiomatic phrasal verbs, where significances of proper Arabic verbs are entirely fused with significances of prepositions following them to produce new significances that have nothing to do with the basic significances of those verbs and prepositions. By examining a corpus of ten of the most influential English translations of the Qur’an, this study scrutinizes how some translators of the Qur’an have dealt with the phenomenon of Qur’anic idiomatic phrasal verbs, the difficulties that they have encountered when translating them into English, and the strategies that they have employed in their attempts to overcome the inherent ambiguity of such expressions and provide their functional-pragmatic equivalents for English readership. The study proposes a working model for analysing and assessing the translation of the Qur’anic idiomatic phrasal verbs and provides a number of theory-based recommendations for translators in general and Qur’an translators in particular.

Landmarks in Linguistic Thought Vol 3 is devoted to a linguistic tradition that lies outside the Western mainstream, namely that of the Middle East. The reader is introduced to the major issues and themes that have determined the development of the Arabic linguistic tradition. Each chapter contains a short extract from a translated `landmark' text followed by a commentary which places the text in its social and intellectual context. The chosen texts frequently offer scope for comparison with the Western tradition. By contrasting the two systems, the Western and the Middle Eastern, this book serves to highlight the characteristics of two very different systems and thus stimulate new ideas about the history of linguistics. This book presumes no prior knowledge of Arabo-Islamic culture and Arabic language, and is invaluable to anyone with an interest in the History of Linguistics. Kees Versteegh is currently Professor of Arabic and Islam at the Middle East Institute of the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands. His publications include The Explanation of Linguistic Causes (1995),Ed. Arabic Outside the Arab World (1994)

This volume is intended as the first in a series of studies on traditional Arab linguistic theories concentrating on Sībawayhi and his grammatical legacy. Here, the reader is introduced to the major issues and themes that have determined the development of Arabic grammar and presents Sībawayhi in the context of his intellectual and social environment. The papers make significant contributions to and offer in-depth introductions into major aspects of the foundations of Arab Linguistics, early Syriac and medieval Hebrew linguistic traditions. This is a unique reference on the three main Semitic linguistic traditions, accompanied by a detailed analysis of some grammatical and pragmatic aspects of Kitāb Sībawayhi in the light of modern theories and scholarship. Contributors include: M. G. Carter, Hanadi Dayyeh, Manuela E.B. Giolfo, Mohamed Hnid, Almog Kasher, Geoffrey Khan, Daniel King, Amal Marogy, Avigail S. Noy, Arik Sadan, Haruko Sakaedani

Michael G. Carter's Sibawyhi's Principles: Arabic Grammar and Law in Early Islamic Thought is a corrected version, with considerable Addenda, of his 1968 Oxford doctoral thesis, "Sibawayhi's Principles of Grammatical Analysis." It systematically argues that the science of Arabic grammar owes its origins to a special application of a set of methods and criteria developed independently to form the Islamic legal system, not to Greek or other foreign influence. These methods and criteria were then adapted to create a grammatical system brought to perfection by Sibawayhi in the late second/eighth century. It describes the intimate contacts between early jurists and scholars of language out of which the new science of grammar evolved, and makes detailed comparisons between the technical terms of law and grammar to show how the vocabulary of the law was applied to the speech of the Arabs. It also sheds light on Sibawayhi's method in producing his magisterial Kitab.