ABSTRACT
Besides grammar, whose historical development and logical structure have been presented in the previous chapters, Arabic culture evolved interesting approaches to the analysis of language and texts in four other fields of research: literary criticism (naqd), rhetoric in the Greek sense (xa(aba), the foundations of jurisprudence (u~Ul al-:fiqh), and rhetoric in the Arabo-Islamic sense (balaga). The common denominator of these four fields of research is that they are all concerned, though for different reasons, with the study of texts, whether literary, religious, or legal. That is why the present chapter will be devoted to a brief presentation of them. One should not forget, however, that although these four disciplines were considered different both from grammar and from each other, they all belonged to the same cultural fabric, so that quite often one and the same scholar could be involved in the practice of two of them or even more. Consequently, it should not be surprising to see that many questions were the object of discussion in more than one of these fields, and that a number of concepts were in use in different disciplines, sometimes with different terminology.
