Conflict in government (Tanāzu ̒): the treatment of the coordination reduction inside the Arabic Linguistic Tradition

Like modern western languages, Arabic exhibits the phenomenon of the shared constituent construction, in which two conjoined sentences undergo a reduction by deletion of an identical element. However, considered the central role played by the theory of government and case assignment (naẓariyyat al-ʻamal) inside the Arabic Linguistic Tradition, grammarians has dealt with this structure in terms of syntactic conflict (tanāzuʻ) between the two coordinated verbs, which compete in order to assign the inflectional vowel to the common constituent. Thus, the Tanāzuʻ chapter has triggered a considerable debate among Arab grammarians, since it violates one of the basic principles of the theory of government, which states that two or more regents cannot act together over the same linguistic element. Moreover, another problematic issue is that, contrary to what happens in western languages, the shared constituent can play two different syntactic roles in the coordinated clauses. The present paper aims at studying the different interpretations given by Arab grammarians in order to account for all these facts.