Sibawaihi

THE BOOK

THIS BOOK is a short glimpse on the huge encyclopaedic work on Arabic grammar, achieved by Persian Sibawaihi ("apple smell"). To put it in Mazini's terms: "Whoever wants to write about (Arabic) grammar after Sibawaihi, let him feel humble". This book further shows that the transformational grammatical operation suggested in Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957) onward, is a fundamental principle of this masterpiece. It cuts across all levels of linguistic analysis, i.e. phonology, morphology, syntax and stylistics.