The Performance of Grammatical Ellipsis and Addition: A Study of the Short Sayings of the Commander of the Faithful Ali (peace be upon him) in Nahj al-Balaghah

Abstract

Ellipsis and addition are two linguistic phenomena that occur in the speech of native speakers. An element may be omitted, either permissibly or obligatorily, when there is evidence indicating it; thus, ellipsis is not permissible unless there is evidence pointing to the omitted element. Likewise, certain letters that are deemed permissible for addition by linguists may be added to the syntactic structure for a purpose intended by the speaker, thereby expanding the meaning.

Ellipsis occurs at the levels of the sentence, the word, and the letter. Addition, however, occurs only in the letters identified by grammarians, namely six letters: in, an, mā, lā, min, and al-bāʾ.

Imam Ali (peace be upon him) performed these two phenomena in a manner consistent with what is found in the speech of native speakers and with the rules of grammarians, thereby revealing a high performative capacity in language.

The actual aim of this study is to demonstrate the practical aspect of the Imam’s capacity, peace be upon him, to realize linguistic phenomena, of which the present study has selected the two phenomena of ellipsis and addition.