Unlike English, Arabic has a relatively free word order which permits different elements, verb, Subject, Complement and Adjunct, to occupy different positions in the sentence (Abdul-Raof 1998). This is mainly due to the fact that Arabic has an inflection
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see section 2.3.2.1 for definition of text types. 97
or case marking system which helps to clarify the syntactical relations between sentence elements, regardless of their positions. Since Theme and Rheme are considered by Traditional Arab Grammarians as attributes of declarative sentences, rather than interrogative and imperative, this section is confined to the study of the declarative mood system in the structure of Classical Arabic. Arabic declarative sentences are normally of two types: Verbal sentences and Nominal sentences (Aziz 1988). The former contains an initial verbal element (V) in its predication and has the pattern V+S+O (verb + Subject + object):
3.54. شُخعس ٢و٣ذط ذظً
Gloss: [Wrote my friend a letter.]
Idiomatic Translation98: My friend wrote a letter.
The second type, the Nominal sentence, consists of an initial noun functioning as a Subject followed by a Complement (C), mostly an adjective, as in example 3.55:
3.55. ٍٞغً ذٔكأ [Ahmad lazy] Ahmad is lazy.
Nominal sentences such as (3.55) which comprise a Subject and a Complement have no verbal element and are similar in structure to equative sentences (see section 3.4.6.3) and are referred to as such (Abdul-Raof 1998). Nominal equative sentences are different from Verbal sentences in that they contain no copular verb, be, when there is no indication of particular time (Aziz 1988). However, a form of the empty verb “kaana” or one of its so-called “sisters” in Arabic, خٜطحٞخأ ٝ ٕخً, may be used to indicate the past, as in example 3.56, or to indicate the future if it is prefixed by the future morpheme “seen” (ط), as in example 3.57:
3.56. الاٞغً ذٔكإٔخً [Kaana Ahmad lazy] Ahmad was lazy.
3.57. اخعذٜ٘ٓ ذٔكإٌٔٞ٤ع
[Will be Ahmad an engineer] Ahmad will be an engineer.
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The same techniques of presenting the gloss and the idiomatic translations of the Arabic examples will be followed in this chapter. .
The verb “kaana”, which is italicized in 3.56, can be compared in English to the verb “was” and ٌٕٞ٤ع to “will be” in 3.57. In this case, the Arabic sentence is still considered Nominal and not Verbal.
Nominal sentences can also consist of a Subject followed by a lexical verb as in the following example:
3.58. شل٤ظُٞح ٕٞزظٌ٣ دلاطُح
[The students write the homework.] The students are writing the homework.
Arabic Nominal sentences which have a lexical verb as in example 3.58 are similar in structure to English declarative sentences. In fact what distinguishes Nominal sentences and Verbal sentences in Arabic is not the presence of a verb but the class of the initial element, i.e. whether a Subject or a verb respectively.
According to Arab linguists, Verbal and Nominal sentences are used differently in Arabic. Wright (1974: 251) indicates that:
The difference between verbal and nominal sentences, to which the native grammarians attach no small importance, is properly this, that the former relates an act or event, the latter gives a description of a person or thing, either absolutely, or in the form of a clause descriptive of a state.
In other words, while Arabic speakers use verb-initial sentences to relate events and actions, Nominal sentences are used to describe people and objects. Although Arabic uses both verb-initial (Verbal sentences) and noun-initial (Nominal) sentences, Classical or Traditional Arab Grammarians (TAGs), such as Al-Jarim (1953), Keenan (1978) and Wright (1974), consider Arabic as a verb-initial language99, i.e. Arabic speakers prefer to start the sentence with a verb rather than with a noun. Al-Jarim (1953: 347) notes that “the verbal sentence is the basis of expression in Arabic”. To be more specific, Verbal sentences with the sequence verb + Subject + Complement + Adjunct display the normal and most common syntactic order in Arabic. According to TAGs, four main criteria form the basis of this tenet: frequency, neutrality, ambiguity and interrogatives (Abdul-Raof 1998). The first criterion, frequency, refers to the degree to which a certain element, or constituent, occurs in initial position in Arabic sentences. Following the study by Abdu (1983) on the structure of the Arabic language, it seems that verbs
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Hawkins (1983) claims that verb-initial languages are a minority and constitute no more than 10 percent of the total number of languages in the world.
most frequently occur in sentence-initial position in Arabic. In other words, Verbal sentences have the higher frequency of occurrence in Arabic. The second criterion, neutrality, refers to the degree of stress or emphasis carried by a certain order of elements. The more neutral a word order is, the less stress it has and the less emphatic it is. Neutrality is also defined by Halliday (1970) as the word order which is unmarked for focus, emphasis or information distribution. According to Arab linguists, Kamel (1982) and Abdu (1983), Arabic Verbal sentences show no intonational peak or stress on any specific element and thus are the most unemphatic clause type100. The third criterion, ambiguity, refers to the state where case markers are no longer available to distinguish, for instance, a Subject from an object. Subjects are normally inflected by the nominative case marker (‟), and objects are inflected by the accusative marker ( َ). According to Arab grammarians, nouns ending with long vowels101, like the proper nouns “Mustafa” and “Musa” (Moses), are syntactically incapable of displaying case markers in Arabic, as illustrated in example 3.59:
3.59. 102٠عٞٓ ٠لطظٓ ٟأس [Saw Mustafa Musa] Mustafa saw Musa.
Due to the absence of the nominative and accusative case markers on both nouns, the syntactic relations in example 3.59 are obscured, i.e. the sentence can be interpreted either as “Mustafa saw Moses” or “Moses saw Mustafa”. In cases of ambiguity, Arab grammarians as well as Arabic speakers always presume that the noun which immediately follows the verb, i.e. “Mustafa” in example 3.59, functions as the Subject. As Abdul-Raof (1998: 52) states, “where ambiguity threatens, the basic order is required”. In other words, the sequence verb + Subject + object is considered as the basic and the most common word order in Arabic. The last criterion to determine the basicness of the Verbal sentence in Arabic is the interrogative mood system. Arab grammarians claim that in the interrogative mood Arabic always favours a Verbal sentence after the interrogative word rather than a Nominal one, as in example 3.60:
3.60. ؟ئُِح َكس ٖ٣أ
[Where went the king?] Where did the king go?
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Equative sentences in Arabic, i.e. non-Verbal Nominal sentences with the structure Subject + Complement are also considered to display neutral and unmarked word order as in examples (4.5.2.) 101
Also known as quiescent letters such as the phonetic sound (i:) or (a:). 102
However, the analysis provided by TAGs to determine the unmarkedness of Arabic Verbal sentences has been criticized for being sentence-based (Abdul-Raof 1998). The analysis of the Arabic sentence had not been objectively tested and substantiated at a textual and contextual level until the work of Parkinson (1981). Parkinson (1981), as well as Abdul-Raof (1998), carried out a wide-ranging analysis of Arabic Verbal and Nominal sentences taking into account the criterion of genre103. According to them, Verbal and Nominal sentences are used differently in different genres. On the one hand, Verbal sentences are more commonly used in news reports and storytelling because the function of Verbal sentences is to relate events and actions104. On the other hand, Nominal sentences are more commonly used in editorials, book reviews and novels, because their function is to describe people and objects. Hatim (1989) also notes that the choice between Verbal and Nominal sentences in Arabic is closely bound up with text types105 and text functions, i.e. the interaction between message, producer and receiver. In his words:
Our conclusions point to the fact that the choice [between Verbal and Nominal clause types in Arabic] is ultimately related to text-type. The verbal clause structure tends to predominate in non-evaluative, expository texts, while the Nominal structure is typically of evaluative, argumentative texts. (1989: 144)
To put it differently, in order to determine the basic sentence type in Arabic written texts, genres and text types should be taken into account. Since one of the main concerns of this thesis is to analyse Theme and Rheme patterns in Arabic expository texts, news reports, the Verbal sentence is likely to predominate in the data selected for the purpose of analysis.
The next section (3.5.2) will discuss the traditional approach to Theme and Rheme in Classical Arabic as adopted by Traditional Arab Grammarians.