The Operational Concept of The Linguistic Norm in the Conception of Contemporary Arab Linguists and its Methodological Constraints: the Speaker’s Authority vs the Linguist’s Practice

Abstract

This article seeks to investigate the operational concept of the linguistic norm in the
conception of contemporary Arab linguists, disscussing the perspective of scolars who restrict
its concept to the grammatical rule and those who consider it as a coherent whole resulting from
the authority of both the speaker and the linguist.
It also elaborates on the methodological characteristics of the linguistic norm, regarding the
activity of the speaker and that of the linguist as this norm’s application boundaries, as well as
addressing the balance between descriptive and normative rules alike. Furthermore, the article
provides an in-depth exploration of the specificity of the Arabic linguistic norm.