Verbal Nouns: Between Inflection and Indeclinability

Abstract

This research aims to study verbal nouns and presenting the grammarians’ disagreement about the most important issues of this chapter, in order to understand some of the rulings that are hidden from many students due to what was mentioned in the books of later scholars regarding their nominal status, their being in invariable case, and their being considered among the indeclinable nouns that have no place in the inflection, and the lack of mention of the disagreement of these issues, hence it was unseen from some researchers that the most important issues of this chapter are disputed, as grammarians differed on their nominal status and verbal status, on their inflected and invariable case, and on their inflectional position. Our aim in this study was to gather the statements of grammarians and their differences about the issues of this chapter. The study focused on the grammarians’ disagreement about the issue of the inflected and invariable case of these names, as this is the issue in which there was much disagreement and numerous opinions. So, I gathered the opinions and attributed them to their authors and tried to give preference to one over the other as much as possible.

This study contained two main chapters. In the first chapter, I talked about the definition of verbal nouns, their purpose, and their types in terms of nominal and verbal. In the second chapter, I traced the opinions of grammarians about the issue of the inflected and invariable case of verbal nouns, in order to get the most correct opinion on these matters.