The Theory of the Arabic Sentence

The central topic of the Shudur adh-Dhahab is the Arabic sentence — its types, its components, and the principles governing its grammatical analysis. Ibn Hisham's treatment of this topic is the most systematic and complete available in the classical grammar tradition, going considerably beyond what introductory and even intermediate texts provide. Understanding why sentence analysis received such emphasis, and what Ibn Hisham achieved in his treatment of it, requires understanding the place of jumlah theory in classical Arabic grammar.

Classical Arabic grammar distinguishes two basic sentence types: the jumlah ismiyyah (nominal sentence), which begins with a noun (the mubtada') and has a predicate (khabar), and the jumlah fi'liyyah (verbal sentence), which begins with a verb and has a subject (fa'il) and optionally objects and adverbials. These basic types are well known from introductory grammar. But Ibn Hisham's interest in the Shudur goes beyond identifying sentence types — he investigates the grammar of sentences embedded within other sentences and the grammar of sentence sequences.

A crucial topic is the grammar of the jumlah in position (al-jumlah al-lati laha mahall min al-i'rab) versus the jumlah without position (al-jumlah al-lati la mahalla laha). In standard Arabic grammar, individual words carry case markers (i'rab) that reflect their syntactic role. But what about sentences that serve as components of larger structures — a relative clause embedded in a noun phrase, or a predicate that happens to be a sentence rather than a single word? Do these sentence-level constituents carry grammatical 'position' (mahall) even though they are not individual words? Ibn Hisham's analysis of this question — distinguishing which sentences have grammatical position and which do not — is one of his most original contributions to syntactic theory.

The Shudur also treats sentence conjunction and coordination — how two or more sentences are joined into a compound structure, what the grammatical relationships between the joined sentences are, and how conjunctions like wa ('and'), fa ('so/and'), and thumma ('then') differ in the relationships they express. This treatment goes well beyond the basic observation that these are conjunctions and investigates the semantic and syntactic properties that distinguish them.

Ibn Hisham's treatment of the qualificative sentence (al-jumlah an-na'tiyyah) — the relative clause in more modern terminology — is particularly thorough. Relative clauses are common in Arabic and their grammatical behavior is complex: they may be introduced by a relative pronoun (alladhi and its variants) or by no pronoun at all (the so-called 'relative clause without a pronoun,' which occurs with indefinite antecedents). The conditions governing each type, the agreement requirements within the clause, and the grammatical position of the entire clause within the larger sentence — all receive detailed treatment in the Shudur.