On Method: Misreading Sībawayhi

The first principle that must be observed by any reader hoping to understand the Kitāb as Sībawayhi and his contemporaries understood it is this: Sībawayhi was not a modern, “scientific” linguist.

Modern linguistics, at least for most professional linguists, takes as its object of study “Language”, and seeks to discover the universal entites, principles, processes, and so forth that characterize all particular languages. They build theories that purport to “explain” Language in general and all languages in particular.

Leaving aside the (dubious) status of Linguistics as a genuine science, there is no doubt whatsoever that Sībawayhi was not concerned with Language as an abstract object of study. Nor did he concern himself with language universals or more broadly with any theory of language or even of the Arabic “language”. In fact it is not even clear that he had a concept corresponding to our term “language”; when he uses the term لُغَة (lugah), for example, he usually means simply “diction”, a way (نَحْو naḥw) of speaking. His focus was exclusively on the speech of the Arabs, and his goal was, roughly, to explain what makes Arabic utterances rationally intelligible, not to offer a “scientific” theory of the language.

Modern scholars ignore this more often than one might expect. They often set out explicitly to “discover” modern doctrines in the Kitāb, but even those writers who eschew this obviously anachronistic strategy nonetheless tend to attribute modern concepts to a writer who could not possibly have had such notions. More careful writers try to finesse the issue. For example:

“One cannot take the measure of a theory taking as its object a particular language without reflecting on languages and on the notion of language. More generally, one cannot take the measure of a theory without having other measures to grasp the scope of the theory studied. This necessity explains the continued use of prevailing Western linguistic notions in the study of the major texts of the Arabic tradition.” [1] p. 4 (emphasis added)

That may or may not be true; but it it is premised on the false assumption that Sībawayhi's Kitāb is a work of theory. It is not, and furthermore the first order of business for the reader of the Kitāb is to understand it on its own terms, not to “take its measure” as a theory. Modern Western (or other) linguistic theories may (or may not) shed light on the Arabic language described by Sībawayhi, but they are of no use whatsoever for the work of understanding the Kitāb itself, any more than modern mathematics can help the scholar trying to decipher ancient Mesopotamian mathematical texts. Modern concepts cannot tell us what ancient writers themselves, writing in an “exotic” languages in the context of “exotic” cultures, thought they were doing and saying. Our concepts are our concepts; they are not trans-historical, “objective” concepts.

The most egregious example of such anachronistic readings is the attribution of Chomsky-style theorizing to Sībawayhi. This takes a variety of forms. Some writers claim that Sībawayhi prefigured the difference between deep structure (or I-language) and surface structure (E-language?). Nonsense; he didn't even use any term corresponding to our “structure”. He could have expressed a notion of deep structure, for example by writing بِنَاءٌ مُضْمَرٌ binā'un muḍmarun, lit. “hidden construction”. But he did not, and the reason is obvious: what is hidden, in his telling, is always a term, never a (sentence) structure. Structure is just not one of his concepts – and neither is “sentence”, for that matter. It's true that he used a concept of hidden terms to explain certain utterances; for example he explains the case ending of زَيْدًا in زَيْدًا ضَرَبْتُ Zaydan ḍarabtu “Zayd I struck” (i.e. “I struck Zayd”) by inferring a مُضْمَر muḍmar “hidden” verb, glossing ضَرَبْتُ زَيْدًا ضَرَبْتُ ḍarabtu Zaydan ḍarabtu “I struck Zayd I struck”. But nothing in the text suggests he thought that such hiddenness involved any notion of deep structure. He's just offering a gloss that motivates the case ending - an equivalent utterance, not an underlying one.

Furthermore, the deep/surface (or I-language/E-language) distinction makes no sense without a concommitant notion of transformation from the one to the other. But such a notion is entirely absent from the Kitāb.

Another Chomskyism that occasionally appears in modern readings is the (alleged) distinction between competence and performance:

“We thus make a fundamental distinction between competence (the speaker-hearer’s knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations)...”. [4] p. 5

“The notion ‘acceptable’ is not to be confused with ”grammatical.” Acceptability is a concept that belongs to the study of performance, whereas grammaticalness belongs to the study of competence.” [4] p. 12

Sībawayhi made no such distinction, and he had no concept of “grammatical” corresponding to Chomsky's concept. Nonetheless, some writers on the Kitāb adduce the notion of “competence”, although they may not reference to its origins in Chomsky's writings. For example, Baalbaki makes heavy use of the term, which inevitably suggests Chomksy's notion, given how indisputably influential it has been since first mooted. A few examples:

“... Sībawayhi’s interest in the analytical competence of native speakers ...” [2] p. 47

“The competence of the speaker is matched by the listener’s competence in the analysis of the utterances communicated to him.” [2] p. 205

Unfortunately Baalbaki never says what he means by this term, but elsewhere in his book it is clear that he is heavily influenced by Chomsky (see quotes below involving “mental” operations etc.). Furthermore we know it is an anachronism, since Sībawayhi has no such term, and never says anything like “listener's competence” or “speaker's competence” etc.

Another Chomskyism that is very common in modern readings is the treatment of language as a psychological or mental phenomenon. Here's Chomsky:

“Hence, in the technical sense, linguistic theory is mentalistic, since it is concerned with discovering a mental reality underlying actual behavior” [2] p. 4.

And here are some stark examples from the literature (emphasis added):

“[Sībawayhi's] conviction that the discipline of grammar should try to match or replicate the mental processes which underlie speech.” [2] p. 53

“Throughout the Kitāb, Sībawayhi’s interest in describing the speech of the Arabs is matched by a desire to justify usage by tracing the mental processes which the speaker performs in deciding to use a certain form, pattern, utterance, etc.” [2] p. 57

“One of the most distinctive features of the Kitāb is the role which its author assigns to the mental operations performed by the speaker (mutakallim)” [2] p. 191

But this is nonsense. Sībawayhi didn't even have a concept of “mental”, let alone mental “processes” or “operations”.

“This approach [i.e. language-as-behavior -ed] has four consequences ... (2) it invites the analyst to propose psychological explanations of linguistic phenomena...” [3] p. 57

“...Sībawayhi devotes much space to psychological explanations for linguistic events...” [3] p. 59

More nonsense. The notion of a “psychology” was completely unknown to Sībawayhi and his contemporaries (as it was unknown in the West until the late 19th century).

 “The Kitāb … is a rather detailed empirical work full of useful examples, whose main purpose is to highlight not only the formal aspects of the language, but also to penetrate into the native speaker’s mind and the situational context surrounding the utterance produced.” [5] p. 80

Again: “speaker's mind” is a thoroughly modern Western concept. There is no “mind penetration” in the Kitāb.

These are just a few of the kinds of errors commonly found in modern writings on Sībawayhi. I'll cover some others in later articles.

[1] Ayoub, Georgine and Kees Versteegh, eds. (2018). The Foundations of Arabic Linguistics III: The Development of a Tradition: Continuity and Change. Vol. 94. Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics. Leiden; Boston: Brill. DOI: 10.1163/9789004365216

[2] Baalbaki, Ramzi (2008). The Legacy of the Kitab : Sibawayhi’s Analytical Methods Within the Context of the Arabic Grammatical Theory. Vol. 51. Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics. Leiden; Boston: Brill. DOI: 10.1163/ej.9789004168138.i-338 

[3] Carter, Michael G.  (2004). Sibawayhi. London ;;New York: I.B. Tauris.

[4] Chomsky, Noam (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge: The MIT Press 

[5] Marogy, Amal (2010b). Kitāb Sībawayhi: Syntax and Pragmatics. Vol. 56. Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics. Leiden; Boston: Brill. DOI: 10.1163/9789047440529