Adjectives and Adverbs in Arabic

Abstract

This paper discusses parts of speech in Classical and Modern Standard Arabic (‘Arabic’ for short), with a particular focus on the categories of Adjective and Adverb. Throughout the paper, we argue that there seems to be no distributional criteria that set adjectives or adverbs from substantives. In particular, neither morphological nor syntactic criteria can be used successfully to isolate a class of items used exclusively for noun or verb modification. The words used for these two functions seem to be part of the class of nouns and only semantic constraints determine which can be used as noun modifiers or as verb modifiers. Therefore, a theory that uses gross distribution only to identify syntactic categories must lump these together in a single class of substantives, as traditional Arab grammarians do.