1. Government and governors

The syntactic term ʿamal ‘action, performance’ denotes ‘governance’, i.e. the grammatical effect of one word of a sentence on another. All constituents of a sentence are either ʿawāmil (sg. ʿāmil) ‘governors’ or maʿmūlāt (sg. maʿmūl) ‘governed’. The effect of this government is a case ending (ʾiʿrab ‘declension’). For the noun these endings are:

-u nominative (rafʿ): rajul-un ‘a man’;

-a accusative (n…