What is it about?
This article is intended to be both a textual and methodological contribution to the history of linguistics. Basing our study on Raḍī l-dīn al-’Astarābāḏī's (13th century) ‘pragmatic’ description of the particle lākinna we will show that Raḍī’s interpretation (lākinna = istadraktu, where istadraktu is a first person verb) is in fact part of a truly general theory, which is itself pragmatic in nature. As part of this framework his concept of fa‘altu represents the formal manifestation of an object whose conceptual category is ’inšā’ (= “creation’). In conclusion the use of a ‘marked’ text as compared with an ‘average’ grammar allows us not only to describe the history of Arabic grammatical tradition but also to represent important nuances between groups of grammarians within this tradition or even between individual grammarians.