A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE CATEGORIES OF DEPENDENT CONSTRUCTIONS IN ARABIC LINGUISTICS BASED ON CLASSICAL GRAMMAR AND MODERN LINGUISTIC METHODOLOGIES

Abstract

This article presents a comparative and typological analysis of the category of dependent constructions (tābiʿ, تابع) in Arabic syntax, including naʿt (adjectival modifier), tawkīd (emphasis), badal (apposition/substitution), and ʿaṭf al-nasaq (coordination), from the perspectives of classical Arabic grammatical schools and modern descriptive-functional linguistics. The study highlights the differences and interrelationships between the classical grammatical methodology based on the “form–meaning” paradigm (governance theory and case inflection) and the modern linguistic approach emphasizing the “meaning/function–form” paradigm (communicative and pragmatic analysis). The analysis demonstrates that many contemporary theoretical concepts, such as information structure, universal quantification, meronymy, and cohesion, correspond to phenomena that had already been intuitively observed by classical grammarians, although they had not yet been formulated within an independent theoretical framework. The article concludes by emphasizing the significance of this comparative analysis for teaching Arabic as a foreign language and for textual and discourse studies.