Download or read book Early Arabic Grammatical Theory written by Jonathan Owens and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1990 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Arabic grammatical tradition is remarkable for having organized a large amount of descriptive material within a sophisticated formal framework. The present study seeks to elucidate the early development of this system from a theory-internal perspective; it is mainly concerned with the development of the syntactic theory as a formal object, as system of rules. This endeavor is constituted of four sub-goals: a description of early developments, their periodization, their relation to the traditional account in terms of the Basran and Kufan schools, and their relation to modern linguistic theory.