The Declension of Nouns, Verbs, and Bases in Ibn Al-Qawwas’ (ca. 1297) Classification

Abstract

      In Arabic linguistic tradition, parts of speech have been classified into paradigms or bases, and nouns, verbs, and roots were ranked following the number of morphemes contained. Such classification helped later linguists and morphologists identify the forms and functions of the relevant parts. This paper, thus, unfolds how nouns and verbs are formed, by following the accounts and works of Ibn Al-Qawwas, a late Arab morphologist who had an interest in the morphemic analysis of Arabic. The paper, additionally, draws on description as a technique for analyzing words, recognizing morphemes, and assigning functions