Planned guides

• Situating the Kitāb

  The Kitāb is an historical work. It was produced in a specific place and time, within a particular socio-cultural context. Why did he write it? What did he hope to accomplish by writing it? What does it have the form that it has?

• Reading Sībawayhi
  • Vocab

    Sībawayhi's explanatory vocabulary is shockingly small and simple, easily understandable (for the most part) by anybody with a basic understanding of Arabic. Yet the Kitāb is extraordinarily difficult to read. This article will offer some concrete guidance for the reader struggling with the text.

  • The Indeterminacy of Anaphor

    E.g. “A man was in the garden. He had a beard.” Seems simple enough - there is only on possible antecedent for the anaphoric “He”. But Sib addresses the (logical) possibility that the speaker intended some other antecedent. In that case, he says, the speech would be “distorted“, muhal, which is his way of saying it would be irrational. (Incidentally, this example shows that Sib did NOT think, as many modern commentators would have us believe, that “speaker intention” controls language. If it did, then this would not be muhal.)

    Another example: Carter's misreading of min sababihi.

• Arabic in the Space of Reasons

  Sībawayhi's discursive rationalism.

• Misreading Sībawayhi
  • Pernicious Anachronisms

    Chomsky, mentalism, etc. But also more garden-variety anachronisms such as "theory", "system", "syntax", etc.

    Such anachronisms are almost always foreignisms as well. An exception is Baalabaki, who anachronizes Arabic terminology.

  • Psychologism and the Myth of the Mental

    Carter: “...Sībawayhi devotes much space to psychological explanations for linguistic events...”. Baalbaki: Sībawayhi desired “to justify usage by tracing the mental processes which the speaker performs in deciding to use a certain form, pattern, utterance, etc.” Marogy: the purpose of the Kitāb is (among other things) “to penetrate into the native speaker’s mind...”. Ayyoub: “...Sībawayhi postulates that the mental representation of the utterance is different from the actual utterance, and that there are non-observable elements in the mind of the speaker that are necessary to the utterance.”

    This is anachronistic nonsense. Sībawayhi did not even have a concept of “mind”, still less “mental process” or “psychology”. Nothing in the text of the Kitāb even hints at this kind of interpretation.

    But: he does use a few terms suggestive of "mind", e.g. خطر على باله, قلب etc. But he did not hypostasize any notion of mind as an object of reflection, even less as a theoretical linguistic object with explanatory power. You don't need a concept of “mind” (or “speaker psychology”) to understand the Arabic language.

  • Misreading Sībawayhi: False dichotomies
    • Semantics v. pragmatics (text v. context)
    • Surface v. deep structure
    • Competence v. performance
  • Misreading Sībawayhi: The Ethico-Legal Hypothesis Hoax

    Carter's hypothesis - that Sībawayhi simply “applied” to language the terms and concepts of an already-developed ethical and legal system - is widely accepted. It is also completely and demonstrably wrong.

• Dominant metaphors in the Kitāb

  Wayfinding; flow; forward movement; raising and lowering; construction; measurement; location; etc.

• Speaker and Listener

  Sībawayhi frequently refers to speaker and listener. Modern commentators often extrapolate from this to conclusions such as, for example, he thought that the speaker determines the meaning of speech, or that the listener controls what the speaker says, etc. In other words, such writers force Sībawayhi into the procrustean bed of contemporary Pragmatic theory.

  Sībawayhi was clearly aware, at some level, of what Bakhtin called the addressivity and responsivity of discursive speech. Everything we say is implicitly responsive to what has already been said, and always implicitly addresses or projects to what will be said next. But it is a fundamental error to attribute to him any sort of conscious theoretical model of speaker-listener pragmatics.

  Such misreadings seem to be based on some version of the “autonomous” model of language and speach, which treats individual utterances as autonomous. But for Sib, kalam was always discursive - speech as (integrated) discourse, not discourse as as a sequence of autonomous units (“sentences”).

  Also related to the “Communication Myth” - speech as transmission of packets of information from one mind to another.

• The Ḥarf (الْحَرْفُ)
  • Function roles (“Parts of Speech”)
  • Primitive terms
• Prosody

  Al-Khalīl and the algebraic modeling of speech - the فعل paradigms.

• Lafẓ, kalām, qawl
• Construction
  • Morphological

    The root-and-template myth

    Augmentive terms (حروف الزيادة)

    Substitutional terms (حروف البدل)

  • Syntactic - البناء and الإجراء
• Continuity - وَصْل, اتِّصال, صِلَة, حَشْو
  • Morphological

    Alif _l-wasl, helper vowels, etc.

  • Syntactic

    Fillers (حشو), Connectors (صلة)

  • Semantic

    اتِّصال in فَ and حتّى

• Inflection
• Selected topics
  • حالٌ and مُحال and حالَ بين and حالَ أَنْ
  • The concept of إِضَافَة “association”
  • إِضْمار