An Investigation of Ibn Malik's Innovative Approaches Toward Some Syntactic Rules

If we take Ibn Malik as the connecting chain of the interconnected history of syntax, we will find him among the last analytic scholars and theorist grammarians, since in his era, the principles of syntax has been established and grammarians didn’t provide new ideas. But discussion of Ibn Malik’s innovative syntactic approaches is important because of two reasons. Due to his authoritative position and deep understanding of the syntactic issues, Ibn Malik succeeded in accumulating the syntactic views of Basra, Kufa, and Baghdad schools of grammar, and in settling the disputes over syntactic issues. On the other hand, due to his great mind and vast knowledge of Arabic vocabulary, Arabic discourse, and rare Readings of the Quran, as well as his reliance on traditions and audition, he could get the same syntactic results achieved by the scholars of Basra school. Studying Ibn Malik's syntactic approach is also important from a third aspect. In addition to Quranic verses and old poems, he used the prophetic traditions as a source of syntactic evidence, while it was disputed among the grammarians that if traditions could be used as so or not.