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home / papers / 2025 / The Active Participle (Ism Fā‘il) in Surah Al-Anfāl: Patterns, Functions, and Its Relevance in the Study of Arabic Morphology (Ilm al-Ṣarf)

The Active Participle (Ism Fā‘il) in Surah Al-Anfāl: Patterns, Functions, and Its Relevance in the Study of Arabic Morphology (Ilm al-Ṣarf)

Summary

The paper looks at the active participle (ism fāʿil) in one chapter of the Qur'an, Surah al-Anfāl. It addresses two problems. Learners often confuse this form with neighbouring derived forms, such as the passive participle and intensive nouns. Earlier work also treated its semantics, syntax and teaching separately. The authors use qualitative library research, drawing on classical tafsīr and grammar references. They collect every ism fāʿil in the surah and label each one on three levels:

  • its morphological template (wazn);
  • its syntactic slot, such as subject of a nominal clause, predicate or agent;
  • whether it is grammatically "active", meaning it governs like a verb.

They count 35 occurrences spread over six templates, and the basic fāʿil pattern dominates. Many tokens behave verbally and carry central syntactic roles. From this inventory, the authors build an inductive teaching model in which students first meet real Qur'anic examples and only then state the rule. They argue that sacred text can work as authentic material for morphology teaching. They also call for similar studies of other derived noun types.

Key points

  • The corpus is Surah al-Anfāl, and the analysis rests on classical tafsīr and Arabic grammar sources rather than computational tools.
  • The authors found 35 ism fāʿil forms across six wazn, with plain fāʿil the most common.
  • Templates depend on the verb's derivation. Bare triliteral verbs give fāʿil (e.g., kātib from kataba), while augmented verbs give forms like mufʿil, mufāʿil and mustafʿil.
  • Each token is tagged for syntactic role (mubtadaʾ, khabar, fāʿil) and for whether it acts verb-like.
  • Verse 8:4 serves as a hard case. There, al-muʾminūn is a predicate, and the following accusative ḥaqqa has no visible governing verb.
  • The pedagogical output is an inductive method (al-ṭarīqah al-istiqrāʾiyyah) grounded in constructivist learning theory.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Each occurrence gets three separate labels: surface template, syntactic slot, and whether it governs dependents like a verb. This keeps form and function from being merged into one tag. — For Mova (frames): English agentive nouns and participles ("the attackers of the city", "those believing") could be tagged as verb-like or not, so that only governing ones open a who-did-what-to-whom frame with roles filled from their dependents.
  • I2. The paper names one specific learner error: mixing up the active participle with the passive participle and intensive forms. It treats this confusable set as the core of the teaching problem. — For Mova (tokens): we could build small contrast sets for English look-alikes such as -ing vs -ed participles vs adjectives, and track tagger and lemma accuracy on exactly those pairs.
  • I3. Rules are derived from observed authentic examples first and stated only afterwards, rather than imposed top-down. — For Mova (learn): self-induced repair rules could follow the same order, collecting real failing sentences, clustering them by pattern, and only then proposing a rule that is checked against held-out cases.
  • I4. An anomalous construction (the accusative ḥaqqa with no visible verb) is singled out as a case needing deeper syntactic explanation. — For Mova (tree): we could keep a curated list of "missing governor" constructions, such as English adverbial accusatives and elliptical phrases, as targeted parser tests and as a check on how UD conversion attaches them.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.58194/eloquence.v4i2.2822

@inproceedings{irfandi2025active,
  title = {{The Active Participle (Ism Fā‘il) in Surah Al-Anfāl: Patterns, Functions, and Its Relevance in the Study of Arabic Morphology (Ilm al-Ṣarf)}},
  author = {Irfandi, Ihsan and Sayuti, Muhammad and Hasan, Moh. Abdul Kholiq},
  booktitle = {Eloquence 4},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.58194/eloquence.v4i2.2822},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.58194/eloquence.v4i2.2822}
}

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