Syntax of the Elative in Classical and Modern Written Arabic

The paper attempts to present a diachronic view of some syntactic constructions with the Arabic elative. The point of departure is its early stage in Classical Arabic. Since then, it has undergone substantial development, resulting in modern syntactic uses unknown to traditional Arabic grammarians. Of special interest are the historical trajectories of and semantic relations between the three constructions conveying the meaning of the superlative that are in current use in Modern Written Arabic: (i) elative + indefinite singular noun in the genitive (e.g. akbaru madīnatin), (ii) elative + definite plural noun in the genitive (e.g. akbaru l-muduni), and (iii) elative used as an attribute of a definite noun (e.g. al-madīnatu l-akbaru) – all of them translatable as ‘the largest city’, but different from each other in certain respects. A tendency to create symmetry can be observed in the system of the syntax of the elative used in adjectival attribution on the one hand and the manner of expressing a gradation comparative-superlative by means of the same syntactic construction (adjectival attribution) differing only in (in)definiteness, on the other hand. In addition, a construction only marginally attested in CA, viz. elatives following the pattern C1uC2C3ā + definite plural noun in the genitive, turns out to be used widely in MWA. Its plural counterpart, C1uC2C3āayāt, is an innovation whose expansive usage, especially in the journalistic style, can be attributed to the tendency of disambiguation.