Grammatical redundancy and the process of teaching literary Arabic

Siwiec, Paweł

Grammatical redundancy and the process of teaching literary Arabic

Abstract

Redundancy in the literary Arabic is particularly significant on the grammatical level. It manifests itself in the omission of a number of morphological and syntactical formants in the spoken language like the indefinite article suffix, case and gender affixes etc. This property of the Arabic language had drawn attention of the earliest Arab philologists as they were working out principles of the so-called waqf, i.e. the syntactic pause. Those principles, however, applied only to the techniques of recitation of poetry and sacred texts as well as oratorical speeches. But the mere fact that the neutralization of some grammatical morphemes was in specific contexts considered permissible is nothing else but a clear signal that these morphemes are to a certain degree redundant.