’Clause’ and ’Sentence’ in Maʽānī l-Qur’ān by al-Farrā’: A Study of the Term kalām

The purpose of the present study is to examine some occurrences of kalām in the contexts of ‘sentence’ and ‘clause’ in the Maʿānī l-Qurʾān by al-Farrāʾ. The author will not analyse here extraneous uses such as kalām Tamīm (Maʿānī I, 480.7) kalām ahl-Ḥiǧāz (Maʿānī I, 480.6; III, 139.5; III, 246.2) — in which it seems synonymous with luġa —, nor fī l-kalām ‘in ordinary speech’ (Maʿānī I, 72.11; I, 223.5; I, 281.3) — which is often contrasted with the other two corpora of linguistic evidence, namely fī š-šiʿr ‘in poetry’ (Maʿānī I, 428.13) or fī l-kitāb ‘in the holy scripture’ (Maʿānī II, 164.10). In the first part of this paper, the author will concentrate on the boundaries of kalām, and then on some uses of this term concerning embedded clauses.