The Nominal Sentence

• الجملة الاسمية, al-jumla al-ismiyya, "the nominal sentence": a sentence whose opening element is a noun.
• المبتدأ, al-mubtadaʾ, literally "that which is begun with", usually glossed subject. Handle with care: English also calls the doer of a verb the "subject", but Arabic gives that a different name entirely, fāʿil, in a different sentence type. A mubtadaʾ is not a fāʿil, and the two are never interchangeable.
• الخبر, al-khabar, "the report, the information", glossed predicate. It is what you are saying about the mubtadaʾ.
• مرفوع, marfūʿ, "raised": the nominative state. Its default marker is ḍamma, the vowel ‑u.
• عامل, ʿāmil, "governor, operator": whatever causes a word to take the case it takes. Governance is the engine of the whole system.
• رابط, rābiṭ, "link": the element tying a sentence-predicate back to its subject.
• نواسخ, nawāsikh, "abrogators": words that enter the nominal sentence and overturn its default case pattern.

Arabic terms are given in script, then transliterated, then glossed. The transliteration is academic: macrons mark long vowels, ʿ is ʿayn and ʾ is hamza, so every form can be read back into Arabic without ambiguity.

The grammarians classify by the ṣadr, the opening of the sentence.

The case that surprises English speakers is a sentence that plainly contains a verb and is still nominal.

This classification is Baṣran, and it is the one the mainstream tradition and this site follow. The Kūfans analysed fronted-noun sentences differently in places; where such disagreements affect the iʿrāb you will meet them in the relevant lesson.

Semantically the tradition observes that the nominal sentence tends to express thubūt, a settled state, while the verbal sentence expresses tajaddud, renewal and occurrence. That is a tendency worth knowing, not a rule to parse by. Parse by the opening element.

Now the governance question. In a verbal sentence the verb is the ʿāmil: it raises its fāʿil. Here there is no verb. The grammarians' answer is that the mubtadaʾ is raised by al-ibtidāʾ itself, by the bare fact of being the element the sentence is built on. This is a ʿāmil maʿnawī, an abstract governor rather than a word you can point to. The khabar in turn is raised by the mubtadaʾ. So the chain runs: initiality raises the subject, and the subject raises the predicate.

This matters practically. Students who have learned that "the verb causes the endings" go looking for a verb in al-ʿilmu nūrun, fail to find one, and guess. There is nothing to find. The governor here is a relationship, not a word.

The markers themselves, original and substitute, are the subject of the markers of iʿrāb.

English marks case on pronouns only: he against him, who against whom. Nobody thinks "him" means something different from "he"; it is the same word wearing a different grammatical role. Arabic simply does openly, on nearly every noun, what English does on a handful of pronouns. When you read al-ʿilmu and later al-ʿilma, that final vowel is doing the work that he and him do.

The habit to unlearn is supplying "is". "Knowledge is light" needs a verb in English; the Arabic has none, and no word in it corresponds to "is". If you go looking for the copula you will invent a governor that is not there. The equational relationship is carried by two nouns standing together, both in the nominative.

Learners who know Latin, German, Greek or Russian have a real advantage and should lean on it: marfūʿ is close to nominative, manṣūb to accusative, majrūr to genitive. The correspondence is close enough to be useful and loose enough to be dangerous, so treat it as a bridge to intuition rather than a definition.

1. Mufrad, a single word. Note that mufrad here is technical, meaning "not a sentence and not a phrase". A dual or a plural still counts as mufrad in this sense.

2. Jumla, a whole sentence. A sentence-predicate must contain a rābiṭ tying it to the subject, or the two halves are unrelated statements sitting side by side.

3. Shibh jumla, a quasi-sentence. This is the subtle one, and the analysis is not what the English translation suggests.

Fronting the khabar is obligatory in three well known situations:

• The khabar is a shibh jumla and the mubtadaʾ is indefinite.
• The khabar has an inherent right to initial position, such as an interrogative: أَيْنَ الْكِتَابُ؟, ayna l-kitābu, "where is the book?"
• The mubtadaʾ carries a pronoun referring to something inside the khabar: فِي الدَّارِ صَاحِبُهَا, fī l-dāri ṣāḥibuhā, "in the house is its owner". Leaving the order unreversed would make the pronoun point forward to something not yet mentioned.

Which brings us to indefinite subjects. The default is a definite mubtadaʾ, for a plain reason: a statement about something entirely unidentified conveys nothing. "A man is tall" tells a listener nothing at all. An indefinite is permitted when something makes it informative, and the tradition catalogues these licensors, musawwighāt:

• It is described: رَجُلٌ كَرِيمٌ زَارَنَا, rajulun karīmun zāranā, "a generous man visited us".
• It follows negation or a question: مَا أَحَدٌ عِنْدَنَا, mā aḥadun ʿindanā, "no one is with us".
• It expresses a prayer: سَلَامٌ عَلَيْكُمْ, salāmun ʿalaykum, "peace be upon you".
• The predicate is fronted: the case above.

The word nāsikh is worth pausing on: its root means to cancel or supersede. The grammarians are saying the sentence still is a nominal sentence with two pillars. The abrogator has overturned the case ruling on them, not rebuilt the sentence. Each family has its own conditions and meanings, treated in kāna and its sisters and inna and its sisters.

• Putting the khabar in the accusative. Writing al-ʿilmu nūran by analogy with an object. The predicate is nominative always, unless an abrogator has changed it. There is no verb here to take an object.
• Hunting for the missing "is". Because English needs a copula, learners look for a governor that does not exist and then cannot explain the endings. The governor is al-ibtidāʾ, an abstract one.
• Forgetting the rābiṭ. When the predicate is a sentence it must contain a pronoun, visible or implied, pointing back at the subject.
• Confusing a postponed mubtadaʾ with a fāʿil. In فِي الصَّفِّ طَالِبٌ, fī l-ṣaffi ṭālibun, there is no verb in the sentence at all, so ṭālibun cannot be a fāʿil. It is a postponed mubtadaʾ. A fāʿil requires a verb; no verb, no fāʿil, ever.

The cure for all four is the same: parse real sentences, out loud, in the full classical wording, until the shape of the iʿrāb line is automatic. Read the iʿrāb reference for that wording, then take sentences from anything you are reading and parse them before checking yourself.

• Ibn Hishām al-Anṣārī, قطر الندى وبل الصدى (Qaṭr al-Nadā wa-Ball al-Ṣadā) and أوضح المسالك (Awḍaḥ al-Masālik): the chapters on the mubtadaʾ and khabar, the licensors of an indefinite subject, and obligatory fronting.
• Ibn ʿAqīl, شرح ابن عقيل على ألفية ابن مالك: on governance by al-ibtidāʾ and on the omitted predicate behind a quasi-sentence.
• Al-Ashmūnī, شرح الأشموني على الألفية: for the finer disagreements over what exactly raises the khabar.
• Quranic iʿrāb on this site is quoted from Maḥmūd Ṣāfī, الجدول في إعراب القرآن وصرفه وبيانه, as set out on our methodology page.