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1. Introduction In a modern Arabic-English dictionary, the term maʿnā is rendered by such words as ‘sense’, ‘meaning’, and ‘signification’, so that it forms with its conceptual counterpart a semantic pair quite akin to the signifier/signified couple familiar to contemporary linguistics. Yet, a close examination of a number of Arabic texts of different periods in which both these terms show up, separately or together, reveals that it has not always been so, and that it is only in the final stage of a long evolution that the lafḍ/maʿnā couple ended up with its present-day functional…

1. Preliminary remarks Etymologically, the term lafḏ̣ is a maṣdar, i.e. a verbal noun. Originally it meant ‘to spit, reject, vomit’ and, in the specific context of speech activities, ‘to emit words, to utter’. In practice, there has been a shift from action to result and hence from a verbal value of the maṣdar to a nominal one. Taken substantively, lafḏ̣ is not to be understood as a singular noun but rather as a collective one. This collective and consequently generic meaning implies a globalizing comprehension of the utterance perceived as a whole, as opposed to the words that mak…

Introduction Inflection is one of the two major processes of word formation, the other being derivation. It is generally assumed that inflection serves to signal grammatical functions (such as case marking, plural formation, and verb conjugation), while derivation is used to generate new word classes (verbs from nouns, adverbs from adjectives, etc.). This is not the case in Arabic, where inflection plays a considerable part in the formation of the lexicon. Languages vary widely as to the importance and complexity of their systems of morphological marking. Typologis…