Methodological steps for learning Arabic speech parsing

Abstract

 The rationale behind writing this article is the syntax/grammar learners’ failure to respond to this question: analyze syntactically/grammatically a certain word or phrase? The teaching experience of this course has proved that most university students fail to analyze syntactically and appropriately utterances in the Arabic language. If they do, they often provide hesitant or queer replies. To this purpose, the paper approaches the concept of syntactic/grammatical analysis or parsing’ to both teachers and students. The article further clarifies that ‘to analyze or parse’ does not, now, mean what it used to do; rather, it means: study the language (spoken or written) grammatically – that is according to the principles and rules of the Arabic grammar. The article proceeds to explain the main scientific methodological steps of analyzing speech/writing, mainly:

• Understanding what to analyze;


• Categorizing it to either nominal or verbal sentences or to a complement of one of them;


• Determining the main and secondary clause;


• Defining the syntactic/grammatical function of the word or the sentence if substituting the former; • Defining the word category in terms of syntactic analysis;

• Defining what syntactic inflection means. The article concludes with some practical models and tasks.