“yaqum vs qāma in the Conditional Context: A Relativistic Interpretation of the Frontier between the Prefixed and the Suffixed Conjugations of the Arabic language”

By taking into analysis the conditional structures of the Arabic language both in the treatment of Sībawayhi and earliest Arab grammatical theory, and in European grammars, the paper shows important divergences between the two treatments as regards: i) the hierarchy of conditional particles; ii) the concept of conditional sentence; ii) the correlation between conditional structures and perfect/imperfect tenses. The paper considers then all systems of conditional structures of the type in sharṭ jawāb al-sharṭ as treated by Sībawayhi and earliest Arab scholars and investigates the opposition between yaqum vs qāma verbal forms as a reason for including/excluding certain verbal structures in/from the system of each considered grammarian. A modal hypothesis is thus made that the frontier between yaqum vs qāma verbal forms within in-conditional context can be interpreted in terms of the opposition between the two Aristotelian modal categories of ‘possibility’ vs ‘necessity’ as representing Sībawayhi’s categories of ‘uncertainty’ vs ‘certainty’. The hypothesis, tested on the occurrences of in sharṭ jawāb al-sharṭ structures in the Koran, seems to shed new light on the interpretation of the wider conditional context and of the verbal system as a whole, showing that the coherent complexity of the verbal system of the Arabic language could be explained, in a ‘relational semantics’ perspective, by a purely relativistic interpretation of the opposition between the prefixed and the suffixed conjugation in the different pragmatical linguistic contexts.