ABSTRACT
It is generally accepted that Arab grammarians were predominantly concerned with structure and form - especially case-endings, uttered and elided operants, and the syntactic function of words - and rarely resorted to the criterion of meaning as the main arbiter in grammatical analysis. The failure of the grammarians in interpreting linguistic data primarily in accordance with meaning rather than the formal considerations they employed - let alone their inability to come up with a coherent grammatical theory based on meaning - is the main reason for the emergence of the discipline of balaga. The question of sawahid can serve as a useful framework for the comparative study of nahw and balaga, and is of particular importance since it is only in this area that the subject matter in both disciplines is so common. One should hasten to say that the approach of the grammarians and rhetoricians to the sawahid confirms the points of difference between them.
