This study takes up Tammam Hassan’s critique of the I‘rāb (inflection) theory, which the late Arabic linguist attempted to replace with his notion of “combined evidence” as a “new alternative”:  a system of linguistic structures that articulate discourse, wherein the whole should always be seen in light of context. In other words, each illuminating contextual detail or clue contributes to the derivation of the overall functional and grammatical meaning. The “new alternative”, with its synergies of evidence and its interactive overlapping levels of meaning, enabled the discovery of the foundations of a new grammatical methodology. Inflection provides one of many strands of linguistic evidence, clues that reveal the functional meaning of the sequences of enunciation comprising structural or compositional pattern. But it is incapable of doing so alone or in isolation from contextual indications.  The inflective ending of an Arabic word does not have the power, in Tammam Hassan’s view, to explain grammatical phenomena and contextual relationships; as linguistic evidence it may be considered to be among the major signs of interpretive exaggeration and insufficiently rigorous scrutiny. The study in hand, however, considers the new alternative to be in essence an elaboration of the classical I‘rāb theory.