The Sign from Sibawayh's Perspective: The Dimensions and the Usages

This research paper deals with the concept of sign and its different dimensions in the viewpoint. The preface is devoted to illustrate three topics, namely its lexical usage, terminological usage, and dimensions in the contemporary Linguistcs.
It examines the basic dimensions in viewpoint of Sibawayh especially how he sees its notion, its nature, its role in being a sign, main forms, the speaker's role with the sign and condition of its intent.
The paper then moves to study Sibaeayh's usages of the sign according to both the notion and the referent of sign. It classifies the usages of sign according to its referent into three major categories of usage, namely a word, a part of speech and a syntactic feature. The paper ends that Sibawayh's usage of the sign is closer to the usage of Simiotics than the usages of his followers of Arab grammarians. This means that it is closer to the concept of linguistic code or sign in general than to the functional marks of end cases, number and gender etc.
To conclude that, the paper has reviewed the different applications of the usages of sign in Sibawh's perspective exploring and analyzing the cases of using the sign in his book "Al-Kitab".