Ẓarf and mafʿūl fī-hi: Really Two of a Kind?
Résumé
This paper investigates the categories of ẓarf and mafʿūl fī-hi as they occur in the Arabic grammatical tradition. The analysis of some passages and examples from Ibn al-Sarrāǧ’s ʾUṣūl and Zaǧǧāǧī’s Ǧumal lead us to conclude that these two terms are not synonyms: ẓarf indicates the semantic role of locative and temporal, whereas mafʿūl fī-hi designates a syntactic function and thus represents only a subset of all the possible occurrences of ẓarf. Ibn al-Sarrāǧ defines the mafʿūl fī-hi as the verbal adjunct of time and place in the accusative case, whereas Zaǧǧāǧī defines it in terms of the scope it has (the predicative core of the sentence).
Zaǧǧāǧī also makes use of these two terms for the definition of the noun as a part of speech, especially in his ʾĪḍāḥ. At this level of the linguistic analysis, the two terms reverse their extension: in Zaǧǧāǧī’s theoretical structuration of the different occurrences that define a noun, the ẓarf becomes a subset of mafʿūl fī-hi since the mafʿūl (in the broader sense) constitutes one of the possible occurrences of the noun.