The Arabic grammatical tradition has two different terms in order to refer to complex linguistic units : kalam, which belongs to the common stock of the language, denotes the utterance as defined in terms of semantic autonomy and communicational relevance, implying a speaker and an addressee; jumla, which appeared at a later period, refers to the sentence as a syntactic construction based upon a predicative link. The paper investigates the way in which the relationship between these two notions was considered by the Arabic grammarians between the late 8th and the mid-14th centuries.