Les systèmes hypothétiques de l’arabe classique. Étude syntaxique et sémantique: une hypothèse modale

By taking into analysis the conditional structures of classical Arabic both in the Arab and in the European grammatical tradition, the research shows important divergences between the two traditions as regards the hierarchy of conditional particles, the concept of conditional sentence, the correlation between conditional structures and perfect/imperfect tenses. The dissertation considers then ’in šarý ÿaw…b al-šarý (ƒin protasis apodosis) systems as treated by earliest Arab scholars and investigates the opposition between yaqum vs q…ma verbal forms as a reason for including/excluding verbal structures in/from the conditional system. A modal hypothesis is thus made that the frontier between yaqum vs q…ma verbal forms in the conditional context may be interpreted in terms of the opposition between the two Aristotelian modal categories of possibility vs necessity. The hypothesis, tested on the Koran, seems to shed new light on the interpretation of the verbal system as a whole, showing that the coherent complexity of the verbal system of classical Arabic could be explained, in a “relational semantics” perspective, by a purely relativistic interpretation of the opposition between the prefixed and the suffixed conjugation in the different pragmatical contexts.