THE ARABIC SENTENCE: TOWARDS A CLEAR VIEW

Document Type : Original Article

Author

King Abdulaziz University

Abstract

Throughout the linguistic tradition, the sentence has been considered the basic unit of grammatical study. This is a very clear indication of the special and important status of the sentence in the linguistic studies from ancient times to the present. Traditional Arabic grammarians were no exception in this regard. They gave serious attention to this pivotal entity since it is the ultimate structure in which the traditional Arabic grammatical theory operates. However, despite its attested significance in the linguistic studies, the sentence still eludes a structural definition that establishes it as a unit of text analysis in modern Arabic studies. It is because of this situation that many modern Arabic linguists consider the sentence a vague and problematic entity, and thus, they avoid employing it in their studies. Instead, they usually confine themselves to the unit of the clause. In order to define the sentence and establish it as a unit of text structure, the present study sets criteria for determining sentence boundaries. It proposes a syntactic and semantic criteria that draws on both traditional Arabic grammarians and modern linguists views of the sentence. To this effect, the study starts by highlighting the importance of the sentence as a unit of text, then discusses the status of the sentence in modern Arabic linguistics, and sheds some light on its treatment in the Arabic traditional grammar. This paves the way for establishing criteria for identifying sentence boundaries in modern Arabic written text. 

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History

  • Receive Date: 09 January 2016
  • Revise Date: 15 February 2016
  • Accept Date: 03 March 2016

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