Al-Ṣabbān's Manifestations of Reasoming in His Annotations to Al-Ashmūnī a Taxonomic Grammatical Study

Abstract

Grammatical reasoning is considered one of the pillars on which the science of Arabic grammar is based. Many of the linguistic rules on which Arabic grammar is built were established through it. Therefore, it received the attention of scholars. al-Ṣabbān's was among these scholars who paid a great deal of attention to grammatical reasoning in his Annotations to al-Ashmūn's Explanation. Those who study the Annotation find that its author is fond of reasoning, as he was able to employ these reasons to explain many linguistic phenomena in an explanation that is closer to clarification and simplification than to complexity and affectation. It is clear that these causes, despite their abundance and the many names they have, according to al-Ṣabbān; have a typical relationship and a common thing between them. Therefore, we chose to address al-Ṣabbān's reasoning by tracing this phenomenon in his annotation. The study reveals the common and unifying aspects between them, we followed both, the descriptive and the analytical approaches to classify the causes according to what is common between them, regardless of their names.

After the study, it became clear to us that most of the explanations, according to al-Ṣabbān, were dominated by the didactic and analogical tendency, and that most of these “reasonings” were as follows: Some of them were concerned with the phonetic aspects, some of them were concerned with the semantic aspect, and some of the “reasonings” were caused by necessity, some were due to auditory, some were due to frequent use, and another section came to be concerned with the representational analogy.

This study will seek to provide examples and images of these “reasonings”, by way of representation but not limited to it, detailing them, and discussing them. The study required that it consist of an introduction, preface, and six sections, followed by a conclusion It was followed by a conclusion that showed the importance of reasoning according to al-Sabban, and he originally considered it one of the pillars on which he relied in the footnote.