The Term fāʾida in Pragmatic and Rhetorical Discussions by Arab Grammarians

Fāʾida lit. “benefit/usefulness” is an important and complex term in medieval Arabic grammatical theory. It is used by the grammarians to refer to the “value” of sentences, syntactical constructions, or single words, and in various contexts can be understood to mean “communicative value,” “message” or “meaning.” This article studies two uses of the term fāʾida and its derivatives: fāʾida as an informative value of certain sentence constituents (with the related terminology sometimes coming close to the modern term “rheme”) and fāʾida as an addition to the message. The examples discussed in the article shed light on Arab grammarians’ insights into pragmatics and rhetoric.