Word
أبرمت الصفقة من قبل الشركة أمس.
Meaning
The deal was concluded by the company yesterday.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Questions & Answers about أبرمت الصفقة من قبل الشركة أمس.
How does مِن قِبَلِ work in this sentence, and why use it instead of just writing an active sentence?
In classical Arabic, passive sentences were strictly used when the doer of the action was unknown or deliberately hidden. However, in Modern Standard Arabic (especially in journalism), the phrase مِن قِبَلِ (literally 'from the part/side of') is used to translate the English 'by'. This allows you to construct a passive sentence like أبرمت الصفقة (the deal was concluded) while still explicitly naming the agent, الشركة.
What grammatical case does الشركة take after مِن قِبَلِ?
It takes the genitive case, so it is pronounced الشركةِ (ash-sharikati). This is because the phrase مِن قِبَلِ functions as the first part of an Idafa (a possessive construction), making the noun that follows it the second part of the Idafa, which must always be genitive.
Since both the deal and the company are feminine, what is the verb أبرمت actually agreeing with?
The verb أبرمت agrees in gender with الصفقة (the deal), not الشركة (the company). In an Arabic passive sentence, the object of the action is promoted to become the grammatical subject (the 'proxy agent'). The passive verb always agrees in gender with this new proxy agent, regardless of the gender of the actual doer introduced later by مِن قِبَلِ.
How exactly is the verb أبرمت pronounced as a passive here?