--- title: "Relevance of the Arabic Grammar Tradition to — Valipoor 2020" description: "Valipoor asks whether the medieval Arabic grammatical tradition already contained insights about the subjunctive that modern linguistics treats as recent…" authors: ["Mona Valipoor"] year: 2020 venue: "̒Ilm-i Zabān 7" source: "https://ls.atu.ac.ir/article_11273_c0f5d83932183c5b5690cf00a0c78fcc.pdf" doi: "10.22054/ls.2020.49682.1306" licence: "CC BY-NC (journal licence per DOAJ; ̒Ilm-i Zabān)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/valipoor-2020-relevance-arabic-grammar-tradition-modern/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/valipoor-2020-relevance-arabic-grammar-tradition-modern/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2020](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2020/page/5/) / Relevance of the Arabic Grammar Tradition to Modern Linguistics: A Case Study of Subjunctive Mood # Relevance of the Arabic Grammar Tradition to Modern Linguistics: A Case Study of Subjunctive Mood **Authors:** Mona Valipoor · **Year:** 2020 · **Venue:** ̒Ilm-i Zabān 7 · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC (journal licence per DOAJ; ̒Ilm-i Zabān)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.22054/ls.2020.49682.1306) · [PDF](https://ls.atu.ac.ir/article_11273_c0f5d83932183c5b5690cf00a0c78fcc.pdf) · [DOI 10.22054/ls.2020.49682.1306](https://doi.org/10.22054/ls.2020.49682.1306) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W3098396042) **Citations:** 0 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) ## Summary Valipoor asks whether the medieval Arabic grammatical tradition already contained insights about the subjunctive that modern linguistics treats as recent discoveries. She first maps the Arabic three-way case-like classification of the imperfect verb (marfuʿ, mansub, majzum) onto the familiar three moods: indicative, subjunctive and imperative/jussive. She then examines how classical grammarians described the subjunctive, focusing on the particles that trigger it (the nawasib), especially *an*, *fa*, *wa* and *hatta*. Her sources are the founding texts of the two rival schools: Sibawayh's *al-Kitab* for Basra and Farraʾ's *Maʿani al-Qurʾan* for Kufa, along with later commentators. She finds two key ingredients: - **Sibawayh** tied the subjunctive to non-certainty, judged from the speaker's point of view. - **Farraʾ** linked it to temporal reference. Later grammarians refined this into a distinction between absolute and relative tense. Both factors are central in modern accounts of mood (Palmer, Portner, Reichenbach, Comrie). The paper argues that 20th-century linguists arrived at them independently, without crediting a tradition more than a millennium old. ## Key points - The tradition is very long: Arabic grammatical study spans over 1200 years, compared with under 200 for serious Persian grammar. Versteegh lists more than 4500 grammarians and lexicographers active between 184 and 905 AH, many of them non-Arab, mostly Iranian. - Mood applies only to the imperfect (mudariʿ) verb, since past verbs do not inflect for it. The labels are shared across word classes: marfuʿ covers both nominative nouns and indicative verbs, and mansub covers both accusative nouns and subjunctive verbs. Majzum applies only to verbs. - The subjunctive-governing particles fall into three groups: - those that govern directly: *an*, *lan*, *kay*, *idhan*; - those that work through an implied *an*: *aw*, causal *fa*, accompaniment *wa*, *hatta*, *li*; - cases with no visible trigger at all. - A minimal pair illustrates the certainty contrast: - "I am sure you will recover" takes the indicative (*tabraʾu*, marfuʿ). - "I hope you recover" takes the subjunctive (*tabraʾa*, mansub, after *an*). - Earlier work is mainly descriptive and does not connect the tradition to modern theory. This includes Ryding 2005, Testen 1994, Fischer 1978, Talmon 1993 and Sadan 2012a/b, with Sadan 2012a being the most detailed. ## Interesting ideas - The verb in the main clause sets the certainty of the embedded clause: "be sure" yields an asserted event, while "hope" yields an unasserted one. Mood is therefore a lexical property of the governing predicate, not of the complement itself. — For Mova (frames): prag could tag each complement clause as asserted or non-asserted according to its matrix verb class, so that "hoped he recovered" never becomes a fact. - Following Farraʾ and his successors, an event in a subjunctive clause can be anchored in two ways: absolutely, as future relative to speech time, or relatively, as later than the main-clause event (as after *hatta*). — For Mova (world): event ordering could treat purpose and *until/so that* clauses as placing their event after the anchoring main event and keep it hypothetical in the world state, making the temporal graph both richer and explainable. - The paper's test is a controlled minimal pair: change only the governing predicate and observe whether the verb form flips. This isolates one factor cleanly. — For Mova (learn): evaluation could add negative controls that swap "know" for "hope" or "want" and check that downstream facts disappear, catching models that ignore modality. - Some subjunctive triggers act through a covert element (the implied *an*), so the grammarians posited an invisible governor to keep the rule uniform. — For Mova (tree): when converting or normalizing UD dialects, a lightweight feature for implied complementizers or markers could keep mood rules uniform across clauses with and without an overt "that/to". - One Arabic label covers both a noun case and a verb mood (marfuʿ, mansub), a terminology overlap that can hide real category differences. — For Mova (tokens): morphology features should keep case and mood strictly separate even when a source tagset merges them, so that converted treebanks do not leak noun features onto verbs. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{valipoor2020relevance, title = {{Relevance of the Arabic Grammar Tradition to Modern Linguistics: A Case Study of Subjunctive Mood}}, author = {Valipoor, Mona}, booktitle = {̒Ilm-i Zabān 7}, year = {2020}, doi = {10.22054/ls.2020.49682.1306}, url = {https://doi.org/10.22054/ls.2020.49682.1306} } ``` - [← previous Relational Graph Attention Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/wang-2020-relational-graph-attention-network-aspect/) - [next → Reliance on Predicative Units as a Method of Analysing and Translating Amharic Written Texts](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/fridman-2020-reliance-predicative-units-method-analysing/) - [↑ back to papers of 2020](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2020/page/5/) ## References 7 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Carter, M. G. 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Zeitschrift für arabische Linguistik I. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. 24–31. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Fischer%2C+W%2E+%281978%29%2E+%E2%80%9CDass%2DS%C3%A4tze+mit+%D9%92%D9%86%D8%A3+und+%D9%91%D9%86%D8%A3%E2%80%9D%2E+Zeitschrift+f%C3%BCr+arabische+Linguistik+I%2E+Wiesbaden%3A+Harrassowitz%2E+24%E2%80%9331%2E) 6. Palmer, F. (2001). Mood and Modality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Palmer%2C+F%2E+%282001%29%2E+Mood+and+Modality%2C+Cambridge%3A+Cambridge+University+Press%2E) 7. Portner, P. (2009). Modality, Oxford: University Press. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Portner%2C+P%2E+%282009%29%2E+Modality%2C+Oxford%3A+University+Press%2E)