Structuralism and the arabic grammatical tradition: what actually changed, and what did not

Abstract

This essay aimed to critically examine the widely held claim in contemporary Arabic linguistic research that European structuralism decisively transformed the study of Arabic grammar. To this end, a qualitative, analytical, and historical-comparative approach was adopted, based on a critical analysis of primary sources of European structuralism—primarily the works of Ferdinand de Saussure, Leonard Bloomfield, and Roman Jakobson—as well as the classical and modern Arabic grammatical tradition, represented by Sibawayh's Al-Kitāb and Tammam Hassan's work on the theory of convergence of clues (taḍāfur al-qarāʾin). The analysis was supplemented by recent scholarly literature on Arabic linguistics, structuralism, functionalism, and cognitive linguistics. The results showed that structuralism's main contribution lay not in offering new knowledge about the Arabic language, but in introducing a different epistemological criterion for evaluating the validity of linguistic explanations. This approach allowed for the identification of limitations in the classical theory of ʿāmil, although Hassan's alternative proposal also failed to conclusively resolve these difficulties when subjected to the same level of critical analysis. It is concluded that the influence of structuralism on Arabic grammar has been more methodological than theoretical, and that much of the existing literature consists of pedagogical reinterpretations rather than empirically verified developments