The Arabic Language

6.5 Syntax
Perhaps the most striking syntactic feature in Arabic is the asymmetrical agree
-
ment pattern of the sentence. According to traditional Western analysis, Classical 
Arabic has two types of sentences: nominal and verbal sentences. When the 

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The Arabic Language
sentence does not contain a verb, it is called a nominal sentence. This sentence 
type has two constituents, a subject and a nominal predicate, as in (8):
(8) 
zayd-un 
ṭabīb-un
Zayd-NOM 
doctor-NOM
‘Zayd is a doctor’
A nominal sentence does not contain a verb, since Arabic is one of the languages 
that do not express a copula, at least not in the present tense; in the past tense 
this sentence contains a copula, as in (9):
(9) 
kāna 
zayd-un 
ṭabīb-an
COP.PAST.3ms Zayd-NOM 
doctor-ACC
‘Zayd was a doctor’.
The second type of sentence is called a verbal sentence. It always contains a 
verb, which appears either before or after the subject, and may be followed by an 
object. Examples of this structure are (10a, b):
(10a) 
ḍaraba 
zayd-un 
ʿamr-an
 
hit.PERF.3ms Zayd-NOM 
ʿAmr-ACC
(10b) 
zayd-un 
ḍaraba 
ʿamr-an
 
Zayd-NOM 
hit.PERF.3ms ʿAmr-ACC
‘Zayd hit ʿAmr’
Under this analysis, (10a) and (10b) are regarded as stylistic alternatives of the 
same verbal sentence. At first sight, their agreement pattern appears to be 
identical, since both verb and subject are singular. Yet, when the subject becomes 
plural, there is only agreement in number when the subject precedes the verb, 
as in (11):
(11) 
ar-rijāl-u 
ḍarabū
 
ART-man.PL-NOM hit.IMPERF.3mp
‘The men hit’
In (11), both verb and noun are in the plural. But in (12) the verb is singular and 
the noun is plural:
(12) 
ḍaraba 
r-rijāl-u
 
hit.PERF.3ms 
ART-man.PL-NOM
‘The men hit’
In both word orders, there is gender agreement between verb and subject, as in 
(13a, b):

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The Structure of Arabic 
99
(13a) 
al-fatayāt-u 
ḍarabna
ART-girl.PL-NOM 
hit.PERF.3fp
(13b) 
ḍarabat 
al-fatayāt-u
 
hit.PERF.3fs 
ART-girl.PL-NOM
 
‘The girls hit’
Syntacticians have formulated several explanations for this asymmetry in agree
-
ment (Bahloul 2006: 47; Aoun 
et al
. 2010: 73–95). One explanation asserts that in 
the Verb–Subject order, the verb is preceded by a pronominal element, an exple
-
tive pronoun, which triggers singular agreement, as in (14):
(14) 
ʾinna-hu 
ḍaraba 
r-rijāl-u
FOC-3ms 
hit.PERF.3ms ART-man.PL-NOM
‘The men hit’
The second explanation claims that the partial and the full agreement differ 
fundamentally. In partial agreement (as in (12) number is expressed by the overt 
subject and does not need to be spelled out in the verb. In full agreement (as in 
(11)), it is expressed by an incorporated pronoun. This boils down to the observa
-
tion that number only has to be expressed once in those cases when the subject 
follows the verb. Yet another explanation distinguishes between those features 
that are inherent in the noun, such as gender, and those features, such as number, 
that are connected to higher level functional categories. In full agreement the 
relation between the preceding subject and the verb is that between a speci
-
fier and its head, which means that all features of the subject can be checked; 
while in partial agreement the verb governs the subject and has only access to 
the inherent gender feature, but not to the number feature. In Chapter 7 (pp. 
112–14) we shall see that when faced with the same syntactic problem the Arabic 
grammarians chose a different approach, which to some extent resembles the 
second explanation given above.
The difference between full and partial agreement does not exist in the modern 
Arabic dialects, in which the predominant word order is Subject–Verb–Object, 
with full agreement. We have seen above (Chapter 4, pp. 51f.) that in pre-Islamic 
Arabic a variant existed with full agreement between verb and subject, but with 
the word order Verb–Subject–Object, the so-called