From Sentence to Text: The Use of the Relativizer Kamā in Modern Standard Arabic Literary Style

Özet

The relativizer kamā, a compound consisting of Arabic preposition ka and the nominal relative pronoun mā, is a polyfunctional expression used very frequently in Modern Standard Arabic. Its description in the literature, however, remains incomplete, unsystematic and mostly morphologically motivated. The syntactic functions of the relativizer kamā are therein mentioned only rarely and sporadically, lacking a systematic analysis. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is the analysis of various syntactic functions that the relativizer kamā and clauses it introduces can take both within the structure of the main clause and outside its structure, at the text level. The analysis is based on the analyticaldescriptive method and the typological-functional approach. Its results show that clauses introduced by the relativizer kamā in Modern Standard Arabic cover a wide spectrum of syntactic functions, ranging from comparative clauses, both factual and hypothetical, via attributive, predicate and verb complement clauses, to the functions of sentence modifying adverbial and connector at the text level. In addition to providing a systematic description of the various functions of the relativizer kamā and constructions introduced by it, the analysis presented in the paper also draws attention to stylistic efficiency of such constructions and the important role they play in enriching the inventory of means of stylistic choice in Arabic.