What is a kalima? ʾAstarābāḏī’s Answer

What is it about?

In his Šarḥ al-Kāfiya, Raḍī al-dīn al-’Astarābāḏī (d. 688/1289) counts the sentence Zaydun qā’imun (« Zayd is standing ») once as two kalimāt and once as four ones. This double counting shows that the kalima is neither a word nor a morphem. In such a sentence there would be two words (Zaydun and qā’imun) and, at least, six morphemes (Zayd + u + n and qā’im + u + n). Nevertheless, by criticizing the definition of the kalima given by Ibn al-Ḥājib (d. 646/1249) as « an expression instituted for a single meaning », Raḍī al-dīn al-’Astarābaḏī reaches the concept of morphem: not only the morphemes belonging to the concatenative morphology (stem and affixes), but those belonging to the non-concatenative morphology (root and pattern), too. Finally, the only way to understand Raḍī al-dīn al-Astarābaḏī’s double counting is to see the kalima as a constituent of the utterance, which in its turn can be divided into constituents. The principle of the segmentation cannot but be distribution, what explains that in one case an implicit element (al-ḍamīr al-mustatir « the hidden pronoun ») is counted as a kalima.

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