Lesson 65 – الدَّرْسُ الْخَامِسُ والسِّتُّونَ

The pro agent - نَـائِــب الفَاعِــل

The pro agent – نَائِبُ الفاعل

• We are still in lesson sixty five of our free Arabic language course. This Arabic course with images and audios will help you learn Arabic.
• We studied earlier the Arabic nominal sentence. We learnt that it consists of two essential parts; the verb (الفعل) and the doer (الفاعل). The doer is originally preceded by a verb in the active form, e.g.:

The doer in this sentence is (محمدٌ) because the verb is in the active form.

• The verb can be in the passive form, e.g.:

The agent (the doer) is omitted from this sentence, and the object of the active voice sentence (الدَّرْسَ) falls in the place of the agent and is called here the pro agent, and it becomes in the nominative case (الدَّرْسُ).

• We learnt in the previous lesson that the agent is that which does the action of the verb, or is characterized by it.
• We can define the pro agent by the same way (which does the action of the passive verb, or is characterized by it).
• The pro agent is called in Arabic (نائب الفاعل) which literally means the representative (or the deputy) of the doer, this is because it replaces the doer and it has all its rules and characteristics.
• Consider the following examples:

• From the above mentioned examples we notice that the doer is omitted, and it is replaced with the pro agent, because the verb is in the passive form.
• Now we will study the reason for which the verb is usually changed into passive voice and the doer is omitted. See the following examples with the explanation: