Angels, Beasts, and Impressive Things
A radial category approach to Qurʾānic Arabic feminine plural agreement
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5617/jais.9996Abstract
Qurʾānic Arabic is representative of a transitional stage in the evolution of Arabic agreement with non-human plural controllers (heads). This stage is characterized by a remarkable rate of agreement variation. While innovative “deflected agreement” (Ferguson 1989, i.e., feminine singular agreement) has already turned into the dominant unmarked agreement option, the older feminine plural (F.PL) has become specialized to the use in a small but (seemingly) heterogeneous set of contexts. It is known that agreement variation can serve as a (secondary) means of nominal classification (Barlow 1992). This paper aims at identifying the “class” of nouns able of attracting F.PL agreement, and at describing the other side of that coin: the semantics of F.PL agreement marking as a grammatical category.
Given the complexity of the distributional patterns of F.PL agreement and the fact that they are, diachronically, in transition, it does not make sense, synchronically, to try to identify the one overarching meaning of that grammatical category. Rather, we hold that Qurʾānic F.PL agreement is best described as a radial category, i.e., based on the “chaining” of shared properties among its category members (Lakoff 1987). We thus present the inventory of all 105 Qurʾānic occurrences of F.PL agreement with non-human plural controllers, highlighting the numerous (lexico-)semantic, contextual, and formal cross-connections and similarities (i.e., chainings) that exist among the nouns that are found able of attracting F.PL agreement. It is shown that two “principles” pervade large areas of F.PL use: 1) other-than-human personhood (Hallowell 1960), e.g., spiritual beings, person-like animals and cosmic entities, 2) perceptual salience, e.g. impressively large entities. By analogy to the catchy name of Lakoff’s Women, fire, and dangerous things category, we thus consider Qurʾānic Arabic F.PL agreement with non-human plural controllers to be the grammatical marker of the (radial) category of Angels, beasts, and impressive things.
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