Al-Jurjānī (original) (raw)

Historiographia Linguistica, 1985

Abstract

Summary Most of the early Arab grammarians were chiefly concerned with the description of language structure and particularly the problem of explaining the inflectional marks. Al-Jurjānī, in the fifth century AH/eleventh century AD, was the first among Arab grammarians to depart from earlier trend of linguistic analysis and to put forward a demonstrable theory for the study of language and grammar in terms of the interrelationships that bind the constituents of speech together. According to al-Jurjānī, there are three types of relationships: syntactic relationships, semantic relationships, and the relationship between syntax and semantics. This paper contains a systematic account of these syntactic-semantic interrelationships in particular, and al-Jurjānī’s approach and methodology to language and grammar in general. Our investigation is based on an intensive study of the concepts of naẓm (discourse arrangement) and taclīq (interrelationship) which al-Jurjānī discussed with ample evidence and cogent reasoning in his major work Dalā’il al-Icjāz (Illustrations of the Inimitability [of the Qur’ān]). A distinctive feature of this research is the effort made to show the connection between al-Jurjānī’s linguistic concepts and equivalent notions used in modern linguistics. The study concludes with an important fact; namely, that al-Jurjānī was one of the frontier scholars to call for the study of language on the basis of syntactic-semantic functions and as a discipline independent of grammatical regents.

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