Abstract
Abstract The present paper, based on a complete analysis of the Quranic text, investigates the influence of verbal semantics on agreement choices in Quranic Arabic. Building on the principle according to which, when a language shifts from a prevalently formal agreement system to a partially semantic one, conditions gain more importance (Fleischer, Rieken, Widmer 2015: 21), it focuses on the role of agenthood (or agency) in triggering syntactic agreement. The analysis of the data reveals that the occurrence of an action verb and of an agent subject favors syntactic agreement in the feminine plural, although not systematically. Passive verbs, copulas and state verbs, in which the subject is either a patient or an experiencer, on the other hand, strongly favor semantic agreement in the feminine singular. From this perspective, moreover, Quranic Arabic seems to represent a more innovative stage of the language when compared to pre-Islamic poetry, described in D’Anna (forth.).
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