ABSTRACT
The dual 1 paradigm is our first detailed case study of pre-Islamic Arabic structures. I chose the dual as a case study for two main Arabic-specific reasons, besides its typological importance to the world languages in general and the Semitic languages in particular. First it builds on some data from the case projection on the dual number morphemes. It is, therefore, in a thematic unity of a sort with the following case study on case marking, which helps to draw a clearer and more coherent picture of pre-Islamic Arabic dialects. The second reason is that studying the dual depends also on some of the phonological data we discussed in the previous two chapters. In addition, to look into the history of the dual, we will touch on a considerable number of the paradigmatic features from pre-conquest and post-conquest periods. It is, therefore, a longitudinal study of the system in pre-Islamic and post-conquest Arabic. The chapter presents the formal features of the dual suffix in different dialects, present data showing that it must have developed from a system that is similar to the Classical Arabic dual system and was moving towards a system akin to the modern dialect dual. The chapter will compare the pre-Islamic duals to the modern duals and Classical duals to indicate that in pre-Islamic Arabic the system was in a state of development and decay.
