What Takes the Place of the Predicate in Arabic Grammar: A Terminological Study

Abstract

     Grammar has its own terminology that emerged with its inception. As this science developed, these terms increased and diversified, which led researchers in the field to notice instances of confusion between them. One such term is “substitutes for”, with its derivations, which grammarians employ in various chapters of grammar to express the meaning of substitution. This prompted the researcher to trace this term, define it precisely, and explore its semantic scope as well as its agreement and divergence from the phenomenon of substitution, since it is considered one of its expressions, particularly in matters related to the predicate

   For instance, when the subject is a descriptive word (adjective or participle) followed by a nominative, grammarians observed that the descriptive subject, under specific conditions, governs a noun after it as a subject (agent) or as a passive subject, and yet the descriptive subject itself still requires a predicate. They illustrated this with examples such as “Are the two men standing?”, where the predicate is omitted, and the subject fills its place                                                                   

Similarly, when discussing the obligatory positions of the predicate, they noted that sometimes the predicate is obligatorily omitted, and instead, a circumstantial accusative follows, which conveys the meaning of the omitted predicate and substitutes for it. This occurs on the condition that the circumstantial accusative cannot, in meaning, serve as the predicate itself. The general principle here is that when the predicate of a subject—which is often a verbal noun—is obligatorily omitted, its complement comes after it, followed by a circumstantial accusative that stands in for the omitted predicate without itself functioning as the predicate               

The study concludes that there is a clear distinction between how grammarians use this term and the phenomenon of substitution. In substitution, the substitute entirely takes the place of the substituted element and assumes all its grammatical rules. In contrast, what “substitutes the predicate” is rather a partial substitution without altering the grammatical status: the circumstantial accusative remains in the accusative case, even though it takes the place of the predicate; likewise, the subject that fills the place of the predicate remains nominative due to the participle, not because it has replaced the predicate in the full grammatical sense