Abstract

The present functional study of Seebawayh book is considered an attempt to reveal the functional approach used in Seebawayh book – the first book on grammar. It is a study which may seem new to Arabic department in our universities if Arabic grammar is a grammar of function where a word does a function when used with other words, therefore, it is used in that construction as it may be an action done by someone or a doer who/which does that action or an object on whom/which an action is done or other functional meaning which cannot be understood unless they are used in constructions. Our choice of Seebawayh book has not been in this domain considering it as an isolated framework in its figures and rules only but because of its treatment of language as speech and utterance and achievement as it is a research on building sentences and what that building and the interrelations between its vocabularies do and also what these different interrelations do of meaning in a form of a linguist study which is pragmatically based. Seebawayh work paved the way for me to choose the functional grammar approach – that approach which focuses, in its analysis of linguistic structures, on describing them and interpreting them when doing or performing certain functions in certain situations. Due to the principal function of language which is communication and taking into consideration the relation between structures and the functions they perform in speech. The meanings intended will depend on the structures, in other words it is grammar that is not limited to the role the words play in sentences.

i.e the structural functions such as subjective case or objective case because such functions are only considered part of a whole interacting with other functions situational or informational which are semantic and pragmatic functions. The structural properties of linguistic expressions, therefore, interact with the communicative functions which these expressions are considered means to perform. According the function grammar is considered an outcome of three functions (structural – semantic – pragmatic) and it stems from a general hypothesis which reads that the pragmatic properties determine the structure and morphological properties.

Accordingly, thesis an attempt for building an Arabic functional grammar which contributes to building an explanatory theory of human mind from the point of view of the linguistic ability in the communicative capacity domain.

Finally, it can be said that Seebawayh established a relation between the linguistic system and the way that system is employed to express certain meaning. The functional theory was not a target an end by itself but rather it was a frame through which available options are declared before speakers,

i.e relating the language to the functions it performs, which enables us to come to the conclusion that the book was a perfect image where Arabic speech symmetry was completed and its effect exceeded the grammatical research domain to other rhetoric fields as it was considered a reference for delivering and deducing sharia laws.