ABSTRACT
This book has been an attempt at describing the process of passivization in Arabic and its relation to causation and transitivity. It represents the first major syntactic study of Arabic published so far within the framework of the case grammar theory of syntax. In accordance with this framework the Arabic sentence has a Q component (which is a categoría! element through which verbal qualifiers such as Interrogative, Negative, Causative, Reflexive, etc., affecting the entire sentence, are introduced into sentences) and a P component (which consists of a verb and one or more deep structure cases or case roles such as Agent, Patient, Target, Goal, etc., each associated with the verb in a particular case relationship). Twelve deep structure cases in the latter component are posited and a hierarchy among them is assumed to exist (Chapter II).
