The Term ṣila in Early Arab Grammatical Theory: The Case of Ibn as-Sarrāǧ

Arab grammarians used many terms both technically and non-technically to describe syntactic, morphological, phonological, and semantic relations between the different segments of speech in an attempt to describe the Arabic language. In addition to technical terms, other non-technical terms were used by the Arab grammarians in a way that not only reflected the original meaning of the terms but also introduced a new dimension for their use. The term upon which this paper will focus is the term ṣila, as well as some derivatives of the root w-ṣ-l. The paper tries to show that the derivatives of the root w-ṣ-l such as ṣila and wāṣil lend themselves to verbal sentences’ analysis with the modern theory of valency where the verb is regarded as the central element which assigns semantic roles to the different nouns in the sentence, as well as the cohesive element that links the parts of the sentence together to form a semantic whole. This is precisely the role of the transitive verb in Arabic when it is regarded as wāṣil.