Markedness and Sentence Structure in the Logic of the Classical Grammarians of Arabic in Comparison to English

Abstract

Arabic as an inflected language comprises rich systems of nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs etc. This is due to the fact that there are always various types of agreement between the elements of these systems and the grammatical categories of number, gender, person and case. Although such assumptions are considered an important starting point in any Arabic/English contrastive study, there is another crucial factor that should be taken into consideration. This factor is related to the philosophy and the logic behind the theory of Arabic grammar. The exceptional circumstances which led to the emergence of Arabic grammar had serious consequences on shaping the minds of the initiative Arab grammarians of the first and second centuries after Hijrah and consequently on the criteria and the procedures they used in writing this grammar. This paper is an attempt to shed some light on such logic and trying to deduce some grammatical rules that apply the theory of markedness to the Arabic sentence structure.