Rashid Al-Balushi

Sultan Qaboos University | SQU · Department of English Language and Literature

تقدم هذه الورقة تفسيراً جديداً للآية السابعة والثلاثين من سورة القيامة، قال تعالى: "أَلَمْ يَكُ نُطْفَةً مِّن مَّنِيٍّ يُمْنَى". يستند هذا التفسير إلى فهم جديد للآية الكريمة وكذلك للعلاقات النحوية بين كلماتها. ويستند كذلك إلى تحليل لغوي للخصائص الصرفية والاشتقاقية والدلالية لكلمات هذه الآية وغيرها من الآيات المرتبطة بهذا الموضوع. ويقود هذا التحليل...

This article treats cliticization of a pronoun to a syntactic host and doubling of the clitic pronoun with a non-pronominal counterpart in Syrian and Omani Arabic. Although the two varieties are closely related and the morphological paradigms they display are very similar, the pronominalization and clitic pronoun doubling patterns they display are...

Qurʾānic verses have always received new interpretations in light of new historical evidence or scientific discoveries. This paper argues for the thesis that Qurʾānic verses may also receive new interpretations in light of novel construal of their linguistic properties. It proposes new interpretations of verse 37 of sūrat al-Qiyāmah (Resurrection,...

This paper investigates a number of Qurʼānic verses that feature the verb yashāʼ, meaning 'to will' or 'to wish', preceded by the relative pronoun man 'مَنْ', in relation to the concepts of guidance and misguidance. The available interpretations of these verses maintain that Allāh guides whom He wishes and misguides whom He wishes. In other words,...

Allah Almighty says in verses (Q. 86:5-7) that the human being is created from ‘gushing water’ that emanates from between ʾaṣ-ṣulb and ʾat-tarāʾib. These two terms have been associated with different body parts in the traditional interpretations and modern translations of the Holy Qurʾān, as well as in some of the contemporary investigations into t...

This paper discusses the critical nature of linguistics courses, and shows how they are usually sacrificed, especially in times of crisis, which results in passive learning. The paper highlights the fact that great potential is wasted when language, which is acquired largely through exposure, experience, and problem-solving strategies employed by l...

تُعنى هذه الدراسة بمراجعة بعض الآراء الموجودة في التراث اللغوي العربي بخصوص بعض التراكيب النحوية في اللغة العربية. وتشتمل المراجعة على طرح الآراء الموجودة ونقدها ومن ثَم تقديم آراء جديدة مبنية على أساس إطار نظري حديث ومستندة إلى العديد من الأدلة والشواهد والقرائن، في ضوء ما تم التوصل إليه من نتائج في هذا المجال، بهدف تضمين الآراء الجديدة في المناهج...

عندما التقى الملَك جبريل عليه السلام بالنبي محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم للمرة الأولى في غار حراء، طلب الملك من النبي محمد (ص) أن يقرأ (من القرآن الكريم)، قائلاً، "اقرأ"، ثلاث مرات، وفي كل مرة يرد النبي محمد (ص) قائلاً "ما أنا بقارئ". وقد فسر العلماء هذه العبارة الشريفة بأنها تعني ’أنا لا أزاول القراءة‘، أو ’أنا لا أعرف شيئا لأقرأه‘، واتخذ الكثيرون هذا...

This paper investigates the licensing of subjects in Standard Arabic participial clauses. Unlike verbal clauses, whose subject may appear post-verbally, the subject of participial clauses must precede the participle, having properties of topics of verbal clauses. I claim that this is because the canonical subject position, [Spec, vP], is not availa...

This paper looks into how two main frameworks view the acquisition of syntax. These are the nativist approach which claims that language is acquired because human beings are equipped with a language acquisition device in the form of grammatical knowledge, and the cognitivist approach which views language like the other cognitive skills and so claim...

This paper surveys several linguistic aspects of the varieties of the Omani Arabic dialect (OA). It starts with a discussion of the sociolinguistic situation in Oman and the factors that shaped it, as well as discussing the OA varieties and the languages spoken in the country. This is followed by a presentation of the OA consonant and vowel phoneme...

This paper presents an analysis for the ‘believe’-construction in Standard Arabic (SA). The analysis proposed here assumes the Visibility Condition, whereby structural Case is necessary to render arguments visible at LF for θ-role assignment (Aoun 1979, Chomsky 1981). The earlier approaches are untenable because they do not make proper provision fo...

Sound plural feminine nouns in Standard Arabic (SA) receive the same case suffix for their genitive and accusative cases. It has been shown (Al-Balushi 2013) that this is because all sound non-singular nouns have no independent accusative case morphology, which results in them ‘borrowing’ the genitive case suffixes of the nouns that bear the same n...

The Traditional Arab Grammarians (TAGs) (Sībawayhi 8th century) assigned somewhat similar terminology for the inflectional states of Standard Arabic (SA) verbs and nouns. Verbs could be either marfūʕ ‘Indicative’, manṣūb ‘Subjunctive’, majzūm ‘Jussive’, or mabnī ‘uninflected for mood’, making reference to so-called ‘mood’ endings. Likewise, nouns c...

This article aims to account for why verbless sentences in Standard Arabic lack a copular verb. In contrast to previous accounts which attribute the absence of the copula to some defect of present tense, I claim that a verbless sentence does not take a copula because its nominals do not need structural Case. The proposed analysis argues that struct...

This article aims to account for why verbless sentences in Standard Arabic lack a copular verb. In contrast to previous accounts which attribute the absence of the copula to some defect of present tense, I claim that a verbless sentence does not take a copula because its nominais do not need structural Case. The proposed analysis argues that struct...

In this paper I propose a new theory to account for the structural Case facts in Standard Arabic (SA). I argue that structural Case in SA is licensed by a feature called Verbal Case (VC). To motivate my proposal, I first argue that the two major theories of the feature(s) responsible for licensing structural Case cannot account for the Case checkin...

This thesis proposes a novel theory to account for the structural Case facts in Standard Arabic (SA). It argues that structural Nom and Acc Cases are licensed by Verbal Case (VC). Thus it argues against the proposal that structural Case in SA is licensed as a reflex ofphi-agreement (Schütze 1997 and Chomsky 2001 crosslinguistically, and Soltan 200...