The ʿawāmil of the nominal sentences

The theory of government (ʿamal) is a central aspect in the study of the sentence structure. All changes in declensional endings are to be related to a governor, which Arabic grammarians should be able to identify for each instance. As far as nominal sentences are concerned, grammarians have advanced a number of theories about the governor assigning the nominative case to the mubtadaʾ (‘topic’) and the ḫabar (‘comment’). The standard Baṣran theory that made its way into the traditional scholarship pointed to an abstract governor (ʿāmil maʿnawī), namely the ibtidāʾ (‘the being used as topic’). The ibtidāʾ is an underlying phenomenon that corresponds to the initial position in the sentence and that produces the nominative ending. On the other hand, other grammarians have advocated alternative theories that explain the assignment of the nominative from other perspectives. This is especially true for the nominative of the comment. This contribution aims to present the different standpoints on the subject and to describe how opposing theories coexisted in the tradition. Finally, it will be discussed how all theories, although presented as antagonist models, ultimately refer to the same concept of syntactic relation holding between the constituents.