Structure and Function of the Arabic Verb (Routledge Arabic Linguistics Series)

Structure and Function of the Arabic Verb is a corpus-based study that unveils the The Routledge Arabic Linguistics Series publishes high-quality.
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Both synchronic and diachronic studies of Arabic are welcome which aid our understanding of the historical evolution and the present state of Arabic, whether dialectal or standard. Works written from a sociolinguistic e. Descriptive dialectological works also fall within the scope of the Series, as do works which focus on the evolution of mediaeval Arabic linguistic thought. Proposals or scripts for the Series will be welcomed by the General Editor.

Structure and Function of the Arabic Verb is a corpus-based study that unveils the morpho-syntax and the semantics of the Arabic verb. Approaches to verbal grammatical categories - the constituents of verbal systems - often rely on either semantic-pragmatic or syntactic analyses. Watson August 21, Filling a gap in the literature currently available on the topic, this edited collection is the first examination of the interplay between urbanization, language variation and language change in fifteen major Arab cities.

The Arab world presents very different types and degrees of urbanization, Islamism in Egypt is more diversified in terms of its sociology and ideology than is usually assumed. Through linguistic analysis of Islamist rhetoric, this book sheds light upon attitudes towards other Muslims, religious authority and secular society. Examining the rhetoric of three central Offering insight into linguistic practices resulting from different kinds of Palestinian-Israeli contact, this book examines a specific conceptualisation of the link between the political and economic contexts and human practices, or between structure and agency, termed "articulation".

Looking closely at the Table 3. These results are further summarized in Table 3. Discussion of them is beyond the scope of this book. It should be noted, however, that their interaction with the Aspect—Tense category, for example, follows from the common modal domain to which they all belong: Previous analyses of verbal forms Our primary interest in this section is to shed some light on the semantico-pragmatic properties of the Perfect and the Imperfect in MSA.

We will show that despite the systematic differences which typically distinguish each verbal form from the other, the boundary between both forms remains unclear and hard to discern. In what follows, we will review the basic claims concerning the nature of the difference between both forms. Consider the examples in In the next section, we will present the different views that have attempted to characterize the above verbal forms.

It is precisely these relations which determine in what sphere of time past, present, future a Semitic perfect or imperfect lies, and by which of our tenses it is to be expressed — whether by our past, Perfect, Pluperfect, or future perfect; by our present, imperfect, or future. Similarly, Jusmanov observes that the Semitic verb has no tenses in the European sense: Apart from the imperative, there are two finite forms which denote respectively completed and incompleted action.

In contrast to Indo-European languages, Cohen argues that while the tense values in these languages are more transparent with reference to the speech situation, the Arabic tenses are more action-oriented and therefore fail to present the notion of tense from a definite point of view. Time specification is then expressed through a multitude of lexical and syntactic means. Arabic demonstrates therefore a purely aspectual system with tense being contextually determined. His studies attempt to demonstrate and defend the following three characteristic of the Arabic verb: The last parameter is the most important for Fleisch.

Accordingly, he argues that the verbal form itself is consistent in describing the development or accomplishment of the action, regardless of its temporal relation to the speaker. Any specific tense-marking is the property of the syntagmatic context. The same line of analysis is also found in Beeston where it is recognized that time reference is not the essential value of the Arabic verb. More important than time, according to Beeston again, is a factor which he calls aspectual.

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Thus, the Perfect expresses a dynamic aspect, and the Imperfect a static aspect. Dynamic aspect is shown to be time-marked as past, while for static aspect the time factor may or may not be relevant; it is nevertheless shown to be inherently non-time-marked. Likewise, McCarus suggests that the primary feature of the Perfect and the Imperfect in Arabic is the expression of Perfective and Imperfective aspects respectively. He further shows that the form of the verb in Arabic does not indicate the tense of the action, but only indicates whether it the action is prior to the moment of speaking or, in case of the Imperfect, occurs simultaneously with the utterance or with the main verb of the utterance.

Without going into much detail, we note that the early Arabic grammarians were extremely cautious in their approach to verbal tense categories. Sibawayhi, for instance, uses formal and functional criteria to classify verbal forms. Accordingly, three morphologically distinct verbal forms are said to express three disparate temporal distinctions: Eight centuries later Am-mirbiinii suggests that the difference between the two verbal forms is based solely on time.

Likewise, Khrakovsky argues that the Arabic verbal forms are separate tenses, not aspects. That is, the opposition of past and future is neutralized in yaktubu. In his latest work, Benmamoun Thus, Wightwick and Gaafar Other proposals, dissatisfied with the either Tense or Aspect views, propose a much more synthesized suggestion where the two features are shown to co-occur. Combined tense and aspect Comrie He rightly finds this double-pronged opposition questionable, since neither tense nor aspect is clearly the central feature with the other merely accessory.

In a recent paper, Comrie Neither tense nor aspect Kurylowicz Accordingly, the functions of Arabic verbal forms are neither tense nor aspect.

Routledge Arabic Linguistics Series

Therefore, the value of these forms is strictly relational, anteriority versus simultaneity. Mere stating of the action and mere description of the verbal action do not appear to mark any particular aspectual concept, hence the lack of both Tense and Aspect features. These presentations illustrate confusions in the literature as to how to characterize the underlying nature of the opposition as illustrated in examples 17a and 17b. Thus, it is shown that at least four hypotheses have been suggested to determine the basic feature of the Arabic verbal system.

These suggestions are summarized in Table 3. One might argue that this divergence over the semantic basis of the Arabic verbal system is due to the complex nature of the system itself. Although it might be complex, it is not so complex, in our estimation, as to give rise to contradictory results, as the analyses suggested earlier seem to imply. In other words, we believe that unless the whole verbal system is carefully considered and many types of examples are considered, claims pertaining to some of its aspects remain merely speculative and partial at best.

On the theoretical level, they have dealt too much in individual variants and not sought out semantic invariants, which are to be differentiated from the range of contextual variations found for a particular form. In order to do so, one should carefully study all the uses of the verbal form in question, and try to extract from the range of reference of that form a common denominator a Gesamtbedeutung, or an invariant of meaning upon which these various uses are based. In other words, a common denominator of meaning is usually not extractable in isolation: That is, whenever it is possible to attribute a usage of the form to automatic syntactic government they do so without looking for the semantic motivation for such government rules, or they attribute to the general meaning, semantic values which come from the use of the form in context, that is, from contextual meanings.

In other words, most generalizations relative to the function of the verbal forms from Sibawayhi until the most recent studies mentioned in our previous chapters remain extremely hasty for the very limited sample of language they rely on. This is evidenced by the fact that each verbal form exhibits a different negator: Moreover, although the negator of the third form maa is still observed, its frequency is too low to gain statistical significance and to make it as operative as lam see pp.

Thus, all three verbal complexes are currently negated with lam, and very rarely with maa. The use of QAD prior to the Perfect remains, however, an intriguing issue to which we will devote the next chapter. Accordingly, one may argue that two forms of the Perfect are attested in MSA: We then attempt to discern the ATM system of which it is part, and finally discuss the basic components which constitute its invariant marks.

Our conclusions remain, however, partial, until we discuss both the Compound Perfect and the Imperfect, the subjects of the two following chapters respectively. Daily newspapers are meant to provide the latest news in as much detail as possible see also Engel Therefore, writers and reporters are generally required to present extensive but very informative texts. Moreover, presenting the latest news generally imposes certain constraints as to what type of verbal form should be used.

If reports are mostly concerned with elapsed events, it is more Table 4. Consider the following examples: The past time interpretation is nevertheless salient. The question that arises is the following: In what follows, we will briefly present the various uses of the Perfect according to the above criteria. The Perfect might be categorized in the following way, where its major contextual variants are: In MSA, the Perfect is quite often used to refer to events which have occurred prior to the moment of enunciation in discourse, or to the moment of writing in narratives, journalistic or literary.

Consider the examples in 4 , 5 , and 6: He knows for a fact that they were standing next to him a moment before. Once again the Perfect form acts alone as the only vehicle of describing a previous event, without the mediation of any other past temporal adverbs. In short, the examples in 4 illustrate the use of the Perfect in discourse, locating the previous presence of the guests and the order of the doctor in the past.

The examples in 5 are taken from a newspaper article. Moreover, the verb which describes the decision appears in the Perfect, which is a clear indication of the compatibility between this verbal form and these temporal adverbs. In 6a the enunciatornarrator discusses secular education systems from a historical perspective. In 6b , the enunciator evaluates previous research relative to the social differences between the United States and Egypt. Similar to the example in 6a , the Perfect is again used in order to refer to previous research and outline previous results.

In sum, the examples in 4 , 5 , and 6 demonstrate that, independent of the type of enunciation, the Perfect in Arabic, whether accompanied by temporal adverbs or not, denotes a past time event, that is an event located prior to the time of narration. Although the resolution of this question is bound up in an intimate way with the question of how the ATM system is structured, and with the related question of the more complex temporal relations which involve the analysis of Compound Tenses, a quite straightforward answer can be offered once we compare MSA to languages such as Haya which distinguish degrees of remoteness in its ATM system.

Thus, there is no specific verbal form sensitive to the relative temporal distance of the actual event — its closeness or its remoteness — with respect to the enunciator in MSA, just as there is no such form in other languages. Indeed, the Perfect is frequently used in relative and complement clauses, as illustrated in 9 and 10 respectively. NA 8 the-club with-the-respect to-Poland. Thus, the Perfect in both subordinate clauses refers naturally to events which took place prior to those in the main clause. In English and French, for example, such contexts typically trigger the use of the pluperfect, a tense which refers to events which occur before a particular point in past time Lewis And defense attorneys said Pridgen had picked a fight and had met his match.

April 14, , p. Tunis Hebdo January 18, , p.

The Perfect continues, however, to be observed and preferred over the Imperfect. Stative verbs in English, for example, are typically distinguished from non-stative verbs through their resistance to the ING-construction. They include verbs which express emotions, such as love, hate, like, and so on, and those which denote mental states, such as understand, know, believe, and so on.

Accordingly, sentences such as 16 and 17 which follow are said to be ungrammatical: The examples in 16 and 17 are shown to be ungrammatical for the purpose of distinguishing them from non-stative verbs, such as work, do, write and so on which are compatible with the progressive form, illustrated as follows: The grammatical contrast between the examples in 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , and 20 , as traditionally observed to argue for verb classification, is very simplistic and superficial at best.

Besides, the criteria upon which various tests of verb classification are conducted are too strong to account for the salient differences involved. The question we wish to address here focuses on the relationship that each verb establishes between the moment of enunciation and the verbal event, independently of the semantic class to which each verb is said to belong. The example in 13 is taken from a conversation between a mother and her son during which the mother tries to explain the guidelines which the boy should follow during his organized trip.

The mother was still elaborating on a few points when she stopped and asked him 13a , that is, whether he is following her and understand what she is saying or not. What concerns us most here is the use of the Perfect in both 13a and 13b. The boundaries of this understanding include previous and current instructions up to the point she asked the question. If we were to use the concept of interval to represent the verbal process, we should be able to represent both the first point and the last point of the interval.

Notice that the last point, which corresponds to the last word the mother says, has a very close tie with the moment of utterance of 13a , if it does not coincide with it. Here again, it is not clear whether the use of the Perfect imposes some sort of detachment from the moment of enunciation.

In sum, there seem to be reasons to believe that the use of the Perfect in both 13a and 13b has a present time interpretation, or better, lacks an exclusively past time interpretation. This is illustrated in 23a and 23b respectively. Consider the examples in 24 and Although the fact of understanding refers to something which has already been uttered, and is therefore about a past time event, the enunciator and the coenunciator in both 24 and 25 use the present tense form of the verb. Note, however, that the use of the past tense in similar contexts is also observed.

The possibility of using the past tense in both English and French in these contexts is certainly not excluded. It should be stressed, however, that this use is the marked case, and appears, therefore, in rather specific contexts. In addition, the resultative properties of the verbal event, namely the process of understanding, which extends to the present time, that is to the time of enunciation, forces the emergence of the present interpretation, hence the use of the present tense. We take the contrast between the examples in 23 from Arabic, and those in 24 and 25 from English and French, respectively as more evidence for the compatibility of the Perfect in Arabic with present time interpretations.

Now, consider the example in Here the enunciator is looking for his watch inside the room. Delighted, he announces to his brother, while he is leaning to pick it up, that he found his watch. This raises the question of the temporal relationship between the verbal event, namely finding the watch, and the moment of enunciation of Two possible scenarios might result in two different answers. To decide between these two competing hypotheses, one can apply a time adverbial test and see whether 14 is compatible with present or past time adverbs.

Indeed, Nabil was still on his way to the exit door when he uttered 15b , and the choice of the Perfect does not imply that the event has already occurred and therefore has a past time interpretation; instead, it expresses an ongoing activity which has not come to its end. This is not particular to Arabic, however. Consider the French examples in I was inside a drug store pharmacie when a gentleman came in. Thinking he was late, he asked the young lady in the store what time the pharmacy closes 27a. This suggests that the present time interpretation of both the Perfect and the past participle shows the compatibility of these verbal forms with such time intervals.

More evidence for the present time interpretation of the Perfect is found in its use in present conditional clauses, as illustrated in Pf brother-my now, will-leave. This is further illustrated through the use of the present in English, as shown in the translation in both 29b and 30b , and French, as in 31b and 32b respectively. Finally, while examining various translated versions of Arabic short stories, I have quite often noticed that the Perfect is rendered a present in various contexts in the English translation.

This is illustrated in Pf bi-ka yaa mawlaanaa? SS 3 with-you Voc. In what follows, we will examine another contextual variant of the Perfect in so-called gnomic contexts. Gnomic interpretation Consider the examples in 34 — Pf and whoever cultivate. Pf on the-path arrive. Pf knowledge and teach. This peculiarity is revealed through its sharp contrast with other verbal forms in other languages, such as English, as shown in the translation.

The example in 34 , for instance, is a famous Arabic proverb to which most educators in the Arab world refer when teaching children social values such as work, endurance, and success. These values are not temporally bound, and are therefore valid at only one point in time. Their validity is certainly based on previous and current human experience s. As for future experience, although it remains unknown, its validity is taken for granted and is thus considered equivalent to previous and current experiences.

Being interpreted as gnomic, that is, valid anywhere anytime 34 is meant to enhance the capabilities of children, build confidence and trust in themselves and encourage younger generations to work and to work hard in order to succeed. The use of the Perfect to express such timeless conceptual values illustrates its unrestrictedness to past time events. Not only does it refer to present time activities, as shown in the previous section, but also to temporally boundless concepts. A comparison with French is instructive with respect to the use of the perfect here. Consider the French proverb below: This illustrates that the Perfect in Arabic is equivalent to the present tense in French in at least two of its functions: The examples in 35 , 36 , 37 , and 38 bear witness to such usage.

Indeed, most proverbs in Arabic make use of the Perfect while English and French, for example, use the present tense. What makes Arabic more peculiar is the mere fact that while other verbal forms are possible in similar contexts see the use of the Imperfect, pp. The frequentative use of the Perfect is another instance of this more general value.

It should be noted that this function of the Perfect is quite operative in narratives where characters are subject to detailed descriptions.

Structure and Function of the Arabic Verb (Routledge Arabic Linguistics) - PDF Free Download

We will finish our discussion of the Perfect in Arabic by showing that in addition to the aforesaid uses, the Perfect is capable of referring to future time events. Future time interpretation Another contextual variant of the Perfect in Arabic is observed in certain conditional and hypothetical contexts where the future interpretation is predominant.

The example in 41 , although very complex, is presented in Abboud and McCarus Its complexity stems from its frequent use of the Perfect when compared to 42 and 43 for example. We take the difference between English and Arabic in 41 as an indication of a difference in the range of possible uses of verbal forms. The future time interpretation of the Perfect is further supported by the examples in 42 and The Perfect in other languages, such as Japanese, Modem Greek, some Bantu and most Slavic languages, exhibits similar behavior Dahl Such cases are given in 46 and Pf-you God where-ever go.

This latter is forced by the immediate context which implies and favors such a reading, that is, possibility in 46 and wish in Indeed, good wishes are most often expressed with the Perfect in Arabic, while French, for example, uses the present subjunctive, and English the modal auxiliary may. This is illustrated in 48 and 49 respectively: Despite their apparent differences, they occur in identical contexts in which the future time interpretation is preponderant. Summary and proposal In this section, we have examined the contextual variants of the so-called Perfect in Arabic.

We have shown that when a wider range of data is examined, it appears that this verbal form is not temporally restricted, as some researchers were led to believe, and may therefore occur with either a clear temporal indication, with past, present and future time interpretations, as indicated earlier, or with a nontemporal indication.

This latter is typically found in gnomic contexts where the enunciator is located outside of the time line with almost no interaction between him and the verbal temporality. Again, the focus here is in many instances on the grammatical subject. The question becomes therefore how to characterize the Perfect given its broad range of uses. In other words, is it feasible to search for the invariant given all these contextual variants whose functions seem to be at times in contradiction with each other? Before answering this question, two issues, at least, need to be discussed.

First, all contextual variants of the Perfect should be evaluated within a hierarchy which stresses their markedness status.

Second, the Perfect needs to Table 4. This not only makes the task easier, but also sheds more light on the grammatical category in question. Various criteria have therefore been put forward for such a classification. The most important, for our purposes, is basic nuclear or core vs. The most straightforward cases of the Perfect are those with a past time interpretation. A closer look at all the contextual variants of the Perfect examined earlier shows that contrary to the past time uses, all present, gnomic, and future time cases are contextually conditioned.

In other words, while past time obtains within the most neutral contexts, as further illustrated in 50a , all other interpretations are impossible 50b , as they require rather specific contexts. Accordingly, with respect to its temporal meanings, we analyze the Perfect in the following way: The issue naturally arises as to whether the reference to time in the Perfect is deictic or not. It would seem to be in the past time usage the basic one , but in the future use, for example, it is not, since what is there at stake is the anteriority of one event before another future event.

We will return to this problem later. But there is more, since each of these temporal interpretations is also bound up with aspectual and modal meanings. All of these uses for the most part also entail that the action is seen as complete d at some point in time which is either the moment of enunciation, as in the basic use, or some moment which is contextually given, as in the gnomic, present, and future uses. Moreover, there is an implication of the relevance of the completeness of that action, relevance either at the moment of enunciation for the present time usage, and relevance for some time in the future for the future time usage.

This means that another issue is whether the Perfect also combines its temporal meaning with aspect invariantly. The combination of futurity and modality is perhaps easiest to explain since many others e. Comrie have pointed out that future time reference and modalities such as hypotheticality and prediction as well as possibilities and probabilities, even wishes about the future, are more often than not related to each other.

The modality of the Perfect is, then, easiest to explain, but the issue of deixis in its temporal meanings, and of the place of its completeness aspectual meaning have to be discussed further. But before discussing these issues further, and in order to provide further data for the analysis to be proposed, we will take a closer look at the Perfect within the Perfect paradigm, a subset of the Arabic verbal system. This linguistic stability relates to its formal characteristics, that is, its morphological structure, as well as its denotational properties, that is, its semantic—pragmatic values.

And, as we shall see Chapter 6 , the same results obtain within the Imperfect constructions. With the aim of being suggestive rather than exhaustive, we will now turn to a brief discussion of the points raised earlier. With respect to the first point, we have already shown that the Perfect has various contextual variants, including the expression of futurity and good wishes, which are reminiscent of its modal features. Accordingly, although no overt morpheme is realized, it should always be assumed that such features are present to a certain degree. As for the second observation, it is only when compared to other ATM systems, such as French which exhibits three verbal forms, that questions about the unicity of the Perfect arise.

Notice that English has only two verbal forms: For the sake of comparison, consider the following examples: The contrast between the example in 52 and those in 53 and 54 shows that while Arabic uses a single verbal form, the Perfect, to describe the occurrence of an extralinguistic event, namely the explosion of the bomb, English has two verbal forms, the preterite 53a and the present perfect 53b , and French has three verbal forms: However, it should be stressed that the broad range of uses of the Perfect in Arabic, as shown earlier, demonstrates its capability of being used for various nuances for which both English and French use separate verbal forms.

This course of events raises the question as to whether the Perfect in MSA behaves like other perfects, which typically establish a relationship between previous events and the moment of enunciation, and expresses therefore the current relevance of such events.

Previous analyses are not conclusive, and therefore do not provide a clear answer to this question. Thus, the Perfect is randomly translated either as a simple past, as in 55 , or a present perfect, as in According to Al-Aswad, the English past tense corresponds to the Arabic Perfect, while the English present perfect is equivalent to the Perfect when preceded by the particle QAD, as illustrated in the contrast between 57a and 57b Al-Aswad This prediction is not borne out, as shown in the contrast between 58a and 58b: As for the example in 56 from Hassan This lack of justification is further observed in the translations he offers for examples 59 and Unlike English and French, the Perfect in Arabic acts by itself to refer to various types of past time events.

This does not necessarily imply that the Perfect in Arabic expresses the various nuances which all of these other verbal forms in English and French denote.


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More important is the fact that some of these interpretations are not inherent to the Perfect in Arabic, but rather to the context in which this latter is used. This course of events obviously raises the salient question concerning the nature of the basic value s of the Perfect. Recall that according to previous analyses, as presented earlier p. Having discussed the contextual variants of the Perfect, the sub-system of which it is part, and some related issues, we will now attempt to discuss the components of its invariant with the aim of being rather suggestive than exhaustive.

A holistic account involves necessarily a discussion of the Imperfect, the other member of the opposition. In other words, the Perfect possesses its invariant meaning insofar as it is opposed to the Imperfect cf. The Perfect and the invariant The claim being put forward here is that the Perfect in Arabic signals a unique operation by which the enunciator evaluates the predicative relation as represented by the verbal event.

This operation has a set of invariant properties which underlie all the contextual variants. After a careful examination of all variants, we were led to conclude that the use of the Perfect involves systematically the two semantic concepts of anteriority and dimensionalization cf. Waugh and Monville-Burston This means that the verbal event is presented as anterior with respect to a particular moment, and dimensionalized: It should be emphasized that, although the two semantic features are syncretically combined, one or the other is dominant in particular contexts.

This means that the two give different but interwined semantic information. Now, if this is the correct characterization, then how does it account for the contextual variants? It is easy to see how anteriority and dimensionalization are inherent to the basic meaning of the Perfect, namely the expression of deictic temporality. In all of its basic uses, the Perfect systematically refers to past time events. The predicative relation is, therefore, evaluated by the enunciator as being anterior to the moment of enunciation T0. In fact, the expression of past time results from the anteriority of the verbal event with respect to T0.

This is exemplified in our corpus by cases where, although no past time expressions are present, for example, dates, adverbs, and so on, the Perfect denotes anteriority to T0. In like fashion, the Perfect denotes invariantly anteriority, the only difference being the location of the point of reference. That is, when used by itself, the Perfect expresses anteriority with respect to a present moment, hence the simple past.

In addition to anteriority, the Perfect presents the verbal event with clear-cut dimensions, without referring to its internal dynamics. That is, it is blind to its individual instances, namely to its beginning, to its development, and to its end. As such, the process is represented as punctual, given the irrelevance of the notion of continuity which normally exists between the boundaries of the event. The event can be represented as in 61 , where the right and left boundaries of the interval are coalesced so that, no matter what its duration in the real world, the enunciator views the verbal process as a global whole: In various discourse genre-types, and narratives, in particular, this very feature underlies the use of the Perfect for advancing main events, or for entities which are foregrounded Wallace ; Waugh As we shall see, in Chapter 6, the lack of this feature in the Imperfect allows it to be used for evaluation, description, and entities which are backgrounded.

In other words, we would like to emphasize that one or the other is more important, but neither is absent. Accordingly, one feature might be the dominant in certain contexts, while the other gets reduced. This entails that a non-dimensionalized verbal process might be evaluated by the enunciator as a dimensionalized entity, the same way that a stative type verb is sometimes evaluated as involving some degree of progressivity see p.

In 41 , for example, studying occurs prior to succeeding. In other words, the wish is evaluated as bounded from within Waugh In like fashion, dimensionalization proves quite transparent within the specific meaning of the perfect, the present time interpretation, in particular. Again, the enunciator presents the events with clear-cut dimensions, although the verbal process did not come to a complete end, as in 13 — 15 earlier. Various discourse—pragmatic factors underlie the dimensionalization of the process.

Such factors might include, fear 13 , anticipation 14 , and so on. Having evaluated the verbal process as bounded, the enunciator seems to consider it anterior with respect to a point which is psychologically established, hence the sense effect of completeness. As for the gnomic cases 34 — 38 , both anteriority and dimensionalization prove to play a salient role, underlying therefore the use of the Perfect. What is important in 34 and 35 , for example, is the relationship between work and success, cultivating and harvesting, walking on the path and reaching the goal.

The underlying principle is the anteriority of one process over the other, the completion of one before the other, hence the naturalness of the Perfect. Thus, the invariant of the Perfect in Arabic is shown here to be made up of two main components: In its basic use it is anterior to the time of enunciation T0 and real. The other uses differ from this in specific ways. The overall thrust of these observations is that the analysis of any ATM system must be rich enough to admit all possible cases, and provide a principled explanation to those uses which might appear to be marginal within the internal dynamics of the system.

The main concern was to determine the basic values of this verbal form through the search for the invariant. This latter appears highly contextualized, that is, relative to the context in which the Perfect participates, although in the absence of a constraining context, the Perfect is typically interpreted as past the basic use.

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