The Arabic Language

particle 
li-
‘for, belonging to’, which was inserted on an underlying level, that is, 
*baytun li-l-maliki
‘house for-the-king [genitive]’. 
The accusative case is used for the direct object (
mafʿūl
), for example, 
ḍarabtu 
zaydan
‘I hit Zayd’, and for a large variety of other objects of time, place, intensity 
and reason. In Arabic grammar, the verb in a sentence such as 
ḍaraba zaydun ʿamran
‘Zayd hit ʿAmr’ is said to ‘transcend the agent towards the object’ (
yataʿaddā l-fāʿil 
ʾilā l-mafʿūl
). This means that such a verb, which we would call ‘transitive’, not 
only causes the accusative of the object, but also the nominative of the agent. A 
verb, moreover, implies not only an agent and, when it is transitive, an object, but 
also the time and the place of the action. Therefore, expressions of time and place 
(
ẓurūf
) also receive the accusative case ending, as in 
ḍarabtu-hu l-yawma
‘I hit him 
today’ and in 
ḍarabtu-hu ʾamāmaka
‘I hit him in front of you’. In addition, the verb 
implies its own action as an internal object (
mafʿūl muṭlaq
), as in 
ḍarabtu-hu ḍarban
‘I hit him a hitting, I hit him hard’. As in English, some Arabic verbs govern through 
a preposition, for instance, in 
marartu bi-hi
‘I passed by him’. Later grammarians 
regarded 
bi-hi
in such a sentence as a real object, the particle (preposition) 
bi-
serving as a link between the verb and its object.
Although in principle verbs are not declined, there is one category of verbs 
that do receive declension. In Arabic grammar these are called 
muḍāriʿ 
‘resem
-
bling’, since they owe their declension to their resemblance to the nouns. This 
resemblance manifests itself in the fact that in some constructions a verb may 

---

112
The Arabic Language
be used as a substitute for a noun, for example, 
ʾinna zaydan la-ḍāribun
‘Zayd is 
hitting’, which is equivalent to 
ʾinna zaydan la-yaḍribu
‘Zayd hits’. The resembling 
verbs correspond to what the Western tradition calls ‘imperfect verbs’ (Table 7.1), 
because they are used for incompleted actions, for example, 
yaḍribu
‘he is hitting, 
he will hit’ (see above, Chapter 6, pp. 93f.). The terminological difference demon-
strates again the difference in approach: Greco-Latin grammar names after the 
semantic content, whereas Arabic grammar names after formal characteristics, 
in this case the fact that this category of verbs exhibits the same endings as the 
noun. In the Arabic tradition, the verbal endings 
-u
, 
-a
and 
-
Ø
are -regarded as 
having the same status as the endings of the nouns, and accordingly such verbs 
are said to be declined (
muʿrab
). The endings 
-u
and 
-a
are identical with those 
of the noun and, like these, are called 
rafʿ 
‘nominative’ and 
naṣb
‘accusative’; the 
zero-ending is called 
jazm
, literally ‘cutting off’.
Nouns 
Imperfect verbs
rafʿ 
zayd-u-n 
yaḍrib-u
jarr (ḫafḍ)
zayd-i-n
naṣb 
zayd-a-n 
yaḍrib-a
jazm 
 
yaḍrib
Table 7.1 The endings of nouns and imperfect verbs
When words are combined, they constitute an utterance (