While grammarians focused on the phonetic and functional aspects in their studies and rhetoricians on the semantic and aesthetic aspects, a group emerged presenting many opinions in grammar and semantics: the legal theorists (Usuliyyun). This field arose to compete with other sciences in the Arab-Islamic heritage as its features, methodologies, and schools of thought began to form in understanding and interpreting religious texts in light of the Arabic language and its traditions. They sometimes benefited from the sayings of grammarians and at other times were independent of them. The legal theorists were not isolated from the studies of the grammarians of Basra or Kufa; among them were theorists, jurists, and reciters of the Quran. Yet, they were not mere followers, but maintained a degree of independence in grammatical, and even more so, in semantic studies. Therefore, it was necessary for these grammatical and semantic studies to integrate the methodologies of both grammarians and legal theorists, due to the importance of this synergy between the two fields in method and subject matter. The legal theorists concentrated on specific chapters of grammar in their books across various schools, such as Hanafi and Mutakallimun. They studied the meanings and functions of particles, methods of signification, divided words into literal and metaphorical uses, considered originality and derivation, and studied generality and specificity, their forms, and the attached lexical specifiers for generality such as exception, condition, limit, and attribute, as well as the explicit and the implicit, and all that pertains to the semantics of words and structures. Their studies ranged from being highly detailed to extremely concise.

Saud Abdullah Al-Zadjali was born in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman, in 1968. He holds a Master's degree in Arts and Humanities from Sultan Qaboos University (2007), a postgraduate diploma in Educational Supervision (2000), and a Bachelor's degree in Education specializing in the Arabic language (1993) from the same university. He has participated in authoring and reviewing Arabic language curricula and has worked in the field of educational supervision since 1998. His interests lie in the fields of grammar, the principles of Islamic jurisprudence (Usul al-Fiqh), and the contributions of its scholars to grammar and semantics.

• Publishing House: Dar Al-Farabi for Publishing and Distribution
• Year of Publication: 2008
• Number of Pages: 344