The Use of ‘Awal in Language and Its Declension

Abstract

‘Awal (أول) signify a preference noun in all its cases, but the debate was wide over its form, morphological meaning, use and declension. Therefore, this research aims at investigating what was said regarding this word, hoping to remove the ambiguity around this word and be satisfied with a preponderant opinion. To achieve this, one has to track the opinions of the grammarians and dictionaries that were scattered in many chapters of their works, and review these opinions to arrive at the most probable one. The descriptive analytical method is adopted in the paper. The use of “’Awal” in specific context and devised examples a means to distinguish between the close meanings of ‘Awal, when used as an adverb. The researcher did not overlook the historical progression of the grammarians opinions, and attribute each opinion to its author, unless unattainable. The research concludes that ‘awal is used as a superlative adjective, on which the rules of the superlative adjectives apply. ‘Awal is rarly used as a noun inflicted. It is also used as an adverb of time and place, although no one ever mentioned that it is an adverb of place, and was exclusively assigned as a temporal adverb. It also never occurs as a circumstantial adverb unless it does not signify the adverb in it meaning. The paper also concludes that ‘awal is not classified as an ordinal number.