Clauses in Arabic

Clauses are centered structurally and systematically around the predicate, and the predicative essence of a clause is what distinguishes it from a phrase. In Arabic syntax, there are verbal sentences and verbless (equational) sentences, and predicates may be of almost any lexical category: verbs (daras-naal-kitaab-a ‘We studied the book’), pronouns (haadhaahuwa ‘This is he’), prepositional phrases (al-kitaab-ufii l-maŧbax-i ‘The book is in the kitchen’), adjectives (al-bayt-ukabiir-un ‘The house is big’), or nouns (haaʔulaaʔiŧullaab-un ‘These are students’). Thus although verbs are at the heart of most predications, because the verb ‘to be’ in Arabic does not surface in the present tense indicative, other syntactic categories may bear the predicate or copular function in equational sentences.

Traditional Arabic grammars often classify sentence-types according to the first word in the sentence (noun or verb – jumla ismiyya/jumla fiʕliyya, ‘noun-sentence’/ ‘verb-sentence’), but the division is also viewed alternatively, according to whether or not the sentence contains an overt verb at all. Verbless sentences are considered a distinct linguistic category and usually referred to in English as “equational” sentences, with a basic predication distinction between the “topic” component (al-mubtadaʔ) and the “comment” component (al-xabar).