The fāʾ of ʾin hypothetical systems in classical Arabic.

What is it about?

In the Arabic hypothetical systems, a fa- appears very oftently between protasis and apodosis. According to Classical Arabic grammar, formed on preclassical corpus and for the sole operator in of the hypothetical systems, this fāʾ would mark a formal break as soon as the apodosis cannot be protasis, that is to say when the apodosis is not faʿala (neutral perfect from the point of view of time) nor yafʿal (imperfect apocopate). However, in addition to the innumerable cases where this rule is not respected, fāʾ oftenly missing where it was expected, its appearance does not answer only to a formal necessity, but also seems to answer to a semantic one: it indicates that in its presence the relation between protase p and apodosis q is not a matter of Logic but of Pragmatics. To put it another way with Larcher, fāʾ is functionally and fundamentally a segmentator which marks a pragmatic break indicating that the utterance is at the level of the natural logic of speech acts where the utterance of p is a cause for the utterance of q. There, different interpretative values can be glimpsed (concessional, deductive, justifying, oppositive, etc.). This paper sets out to add one more, that is a causalo-inductive value, and to show how, after recalling a fundamental distinction made by the medieval Arab tradition which distinguishes between fāʾ sababiyya (causal fāʾ) and fāʾ taʿlīliyya (illative fāʾ), the hypothesis of a correlation between the type of apodosis, depending on whether it is semantically an assertion (iḫbār) or not, and then a performative (inšāʾ), and one of the two values of the fāʾ seems relevant and functional.

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Why is it important?

This study puts to the test the rediscovery, according to medieval Arabic tradition, of at least two types of inferential relations existing between the protasis and apodosis of hypothetical systems, the first causative, where the propositional content of the protasis is the cause of that of the apodosis, and the second, conversely, illative, where the propositional content of the apodosis is a cause for that of the protasis. The importance of this work lies in the fact that it allows us to better explain and understand the (complex) functioning of the syntax of conditional statements in Arabic.

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