Grammatical Functioning in Sibawayh’s al-Kitāb: The Compound Proper Noun as a Model

Abstract

Among the early Arab grammarians, grammatical composition was based on clarifying grammatical functions, as they perceived meaning at the grammatical level and recognized its major effect on understanding speech. Among the many topics to which the early Arab grammarians devoted attention, and on which many scholars wrote from Sibawayh in the second century AH to al-Suyūṭī in the tenth century AH, is the topic of the compound proper noun. Sibawayh’s study of the compound proper noun in al-Kitāb was conducted using a precise scientific methodology, in which he analyzed its grammatical functioning, treating it as a grammatical phenomenon subject to inflection, morphology, and construction.