Arabic Grammar Nouns

[Alice Palecek]

Arabicnouns and adjectives are declined according to case, state, gender and number. While this is strictly true in Classical Arabic, in colloquial or spoken Arabic, there are a number of simplifications such as loss of certain final vowels and loss of case. A number of derivational processes exist for forming new nouns and adjectives. Adverbs can be formed from adjectives.

Arabic distinguishes between nouns based on number (عَدَدٌ ʻadad).[1] All nouns are singular (مُفْرَدٌ mufrad) dual (مُثَنًّى muṯannā),[2] or plural (جَمْعٌ ǧamʻ). In Classical Arabic, the use of the dual is mandatory whenever exactly two objects are referred to, regardless of whether the "two-ness" of the objects is explicit or not. For example, in a sentence like "I picked up my children from school yesterday and then helped them with their homework", the words "children", "them" and "their" must be in the dual if exactly two children are referred to, regardless of whether the speaker wants to make this fact explicit or not. This implies that when the plural is used, it necessarily implies three or more. (Colloquial varieties of Arabic are very different in this regard, as the dual is normally used only for emphasis, i.e. in cases similar to when an English speaker would use the word "two".)

There are over 70 broken plural patterns of which only 31 are common. These patterns are usually unpredictable and should be memorized for every word, however according to the generative linguistics McCarthy and Prince (1990), it's possible to guess the main broken plural form of around 83% of all CVCC and CVCVC nouns by using an algorithm that analyses syllables in moraic trochees.[3]

In the colloquial variants, and in all but the most formal pronunciations of spoken Modern Standard Arabic, the feminine ending -at appears only with nouns in the construct state, and the ending is simply pronounced -a in all other circumstances.

A third value for state is construct. Nouns assume the construct state when they are definite and modified by another noun in an iḍāfah (Classical Arabic: إِضَافَةٌ, iḍāfah), the Arabic realization of a genitive construction. For example, in a construction like "the daughter of John", the Arabic word corresponding to "the daughter" is placed in the construct state and is marked neither with a definite article nor with nunation, even though it is semantically definite. Furthermore, no other word can intervene between a construct-state noun and a following genitive, other than in a few exceptional cases. An adjective modifying a construct-state noun is in the definite state and is placed after the modifying genitive. Examples:

When an indefinite noun is modified by another noun, the construct state is not used. Instead, a construction such as بِنْتٌ لِلْمَلِكَةِ bintun li-l-malikati lit. "a daughter to the queen" is used.

Adjectives generally agree with their corresponding nouns in gender, number, case and state. Pronouns and verbs likewise agree in person, gender and number.[6] However, there is an important proviso: inanimate plural nouns take feminine-singular agreement. This so-called "deflected agreement" applies to all agreement contexts, whether of adjectives, verbs or pronouns, and applies regardless of both the inherent gender of the noun (as indicated by singular and dual agreement) and the form of the plural of the noun. Note that this does not apply to dual nouns, which always have "strict agreement".

In writing, all words are written in their pausal form; special diacritics may be used to indicate the case endings and nunation, but are normally only found in books for students and children, in the Quran, and occasionally elsewhere to remove ambiguity. Only the accusative case for indefinite masculine nouns is often marked. Feminine nouns are indicated using a ة tāʼ marbūṭah (technically, the letter for -h- with the markings for -t- added.

In the colloquial spoken varieties of Arabic, much of the inflectional and derivational grammar of Classical Arabic nouns and adjectives is unchanged. The colloquial varieties have all been affected by a change that deleted most final short vowels (also final short vowels followed by a nunation suffix -n), and shortened final long vowels.

The largest change is the total lack of any grammatical case in the colloquial variants. When case endings were indicated by short vowels, these are simply deleted. Otherwise, the pausal form of the original oblique case has been usually generalized to all cases (however, in "long construct" nouns, it is nominative -ū that has been generalized). The original nunation ending indicating the indefinite state is also lost in most varieties, and where it persists it has different functions (e.g. in conjunction with a modifier such as an adjective or relative clause). The distinction between triptote and diptote has vanished, as has the distinction between defective -an and invariable -ā, which are both rendered by -a (shortened from -ā); similarly, defective -in nouns now have an ending -i, shortened from pausal/definite -ī.

The dual number is lost except on nouns, and even then its use is no longer functionally obligatory (i.e. the plural may also be used when referring to two objects, if the duality of the objects is not being emphasized). In addition, many varieties have two morphologically separate endings inherited from the Classical dual, one used with dual semantics and the other used for certain objects that normally come in pairs (e.g. eyes, ears) but with plural semantics. (It is sometimes suggested that only the latter variety was actually directly inherited, whereas the former variety was a late borrowing from the Classical language.) In some varieties (e.g. Moroccan Arabic), the former, semantic dual has nearly disappeared, and is used only with a limited number of nouns, especially those referring to cardinal numbers and units of measurement.

Elative adjectives (those adjectives having a comparative and superlative meaning) are no longer inflected; instead, the masculine singular serves for all genders and numbers. Note that the most common way of saying e.g. "the largest boy" is أَكْبَر وَلَد ʼakbar walad, with the adjective in the construct state (rather than expected اَلْوَلَدُ ٱلْأَكْبَرُ *al-waladu l-ʼakbaru, with the adjective in its normal position after the noun and agreeing with it in state).

Other than the above changes, the system is largely stable. The same system of two genders, sound and broken plurals, and the use of multiple stems to complete the declension of some nouns and adjectives still exists, and is little changed in its particulars.

A number of derivational processes exist for forming new nouns and adjectives. Most of these processes are non-concatenative, i.e. they involve a specific transformation applied to a root or word of a specific form, and cannot be arbitrarily combined or repeated to form longer and longer words. The only real concatenative derivational process is the nisba adjective -iyy-, which can be added to any noun (or even other adjective) to form an adjective meaning "related to X", and nominalized with the meaning "person related to X" (the same ending occurs in Arabic nationality adjectives borrowed into English such as "Iraqi", "Kuwaiti"). A secondary concatenative suffix is the feminine -ah, which can be added onto most nouns to make a feminine equivalent. The actual semantics are not very well-defined, but when added onto a noun indicating a man of some sort, they typically either refer to the women or objects with the same characteristics. The feminine nisba adjective -iyyah is commonly used to refer to abstract nouns (e.g. اِشْتِرَاكِيَّة ištirākiyyah "socialism"), and is sometimes added directly onto foreign nouns (e.g. دِيمُقْرَاطِيَّة dimuqrāṭiyyah "democracy").

The most productive means of derivational morphology of nouns is actually through the existing system of the participles (active and passive) and verbal nouns that are associated with each verb. These words can be "lexicalized" (made into separate lexical entries, i.e. words with their own specific meanings) by giving them additional semantics, much as the original English gerund "meeting" and passive participle "loaded" have been lexicalized from their original meanings of "the act of meeting (something)", "being loaded into/onto someone/something", so that (e.g.) "meeting" can mean "a gathering of people to discuss an issue, often business-related" and "loaded" can mean "having much money (of a person)", "with a bullet in it (of a gun)", etc.

The system of noun and adjective derivation described below is of Classical Arabic, but the system in the modern colloquial varieties is nearly unchanged. Changes occurring in particular formations are discussed below.

Every verb has associated active and passive participles, as well as a verbal noun (مَصْدَرٌ maṣdar, lit. "source"). The form of these participles and verbal nouns is largely predictable. For Form I (the basic type of verb), however, numerous possible shapes exist across the verbal nouns, and the form of the verbal noun for any given verb is unpredictable. In addition, some verbs have multiple verbal nouns, corresponding to different meanings of the verb.

As mentioned in the introduction to Arabic grammar, words in Arabic are divided into three categories; nouns, verbs and particles. This short lesson will develop the noun and categorize it based on various considerations.

Learning noun phrases in Arabic (or in any language) is a crucial part of building a sentence. A noun is a word that refers to an object, person, or concept. Therefore, a noun phrase is a structure that is based on a noun. In this lesson, we will learn how to build and use noun phrases in Arabic, together with 5 grammar topics that we will go through in the next 10 minutes. You can listen to all examples marked with an audio icon on the interactive lesson.

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