Tense and Text in Classical Arabic pdf download

Tense and Text in Classical Arabic – A Discourse-oriented Study of the Classical Arabic Tense System

By Michal Marmorstein

TENSE AND TEXT IN CLASSICAL ARABIC

Book introduction

This is a discourse-oriented study of the indicative tenses of Classical Arabic. The pivot of the analysis is the verbal form yafʿalu and the functional paradigms associated with it.

The study is based on a large and varied corpus of Classical Arabic prose, composed or compiled by the end of the tenth century CE.

The syntactic analysis of the verbal system in Classical Arabic is considered by many to be a difficult endeavour.1

Grammars of Classical Arabic present a relatively compact system, consisting of only two main tenses or states: a ‘perfect’ and an ‘imperfect’; then a list, specifying a great number of uses of both tenses, is usually appended.2

The beginner student is puzzled: how should the perfect and imperfect be understood? Under which conditions is the perfect ‘past’ or ‘perfect’, or something entirely different such as ‘gnomic’ or ‘optative’?

When is the imperfect used as an ‘imperfect’ and when does it serve to indicate ‘present-future? The advanced student, on the other hand, is intrigued: how is it that all these functions are carried out by only two forms? What is the ultimate meaning of these forms? How should one formulate the logic underlying the system as a whole?

Indeed, these types of questions have been the focal interest of generations of Arabists for the past two hundred years. When it comes to the tense system, Western scholars have departed to a great extent from their Arab predecessors, whose views of the problem were considered to be too simplistic in terms of their semantic analysis, and too obscure as far as their terminology was concerned.

The insights offered by the Arab grammatical tradition were for the most part disregarded.

Many suggestions have been raised to resolve the intricate problem of the Classical Arabic tense system. However different the analyses may be, they all