A Note on the Literal Meaning(s) of the Term (ḍamīr al-)faṣl

This article follows the semantic shift which the literal sense of the term
(ḍamir al-)faṣl underwent in medieval Arabic grammatical tradition. Whereas
earlier grammarians understood faṣl as meaning “separation”, due to the
“physical” property of the constituent in question being positioned between
the subject and the predicate (or their counterparts), the term was later
normally reinterpreted as “disambiguation”, due to the constituent’s function
of disambiguating the syntactic function of the following constituent as a
predicate (or its counterpart). This shift may have been either intentional or
due to later grammarians’ misinterpretation of earlier writings.