Nominal sentence
Nominal sentence
The nominal sentence has two parts:
- Subject, called المُبْتَدَأ
- Predicate, called الخَبَر
Subject (of nominal sentence)
Definite
The Subject is mostly a noun. This noun is usually definite. There are different types of definite nouns, which means the subject of a nominal sentence can take different forms. But not all of them can be used as subjects for a nominal sentence. The subject can be:
- a noun prefixed with ال: البنت ذكيةٌ
- a proper noun: عامِر أمينٌ
- a detached pronoun هو أمينٌ
- a demonstrative adjective: هذا سهلٌ
- a relative pronoun: الذي خرج رئيسٌ
- the first noun of a possessive construction, provided the second noun is definite: سيارةُ عائشة نظيفةٌ
Indefinite
While in the vast majority of cases, the subject of the nominal sentence will be definite, sometimes it might be indefinite. When this happens, the predicate is usually a combination of a preposition (or adverb of time/place) followed by a noun, and it is placed at the beginning of the sentence, before the subject itself, contrary to the normal subject-predicate order.
- على المكتبِ كتابٌ