ABSTRACT
One aspect of SIBAWAYHI's skilfulness in grammatical analysis is the delicate relation he establishes between descriptiveness and prescriptiveness. The Kitab is basically a descriptive work, as shown in its author's concern with actual usages recorded from the Arabs - often exhausting all the examples of the phenomena discussed - and in the lengthy and comprehensive sections he devotes to the sounds of the language, the patterns of words the Arabs use in the dual, the plural, and the nisba, the different moods of the imperfect, etc. This descriptive approach is parallelled by SIBAWAYHI's manipulation of the recorded usages, as in the preferring of certain usages to others, and in the restrieting of other usages to sama without allowing the formation of parallels on their analogy.
