Further considerations on the verbal aspect in Arabic

Abstract

The verbal aspect is one of the thorniest issues that Arabists must deal with, both theoretically and pedagogically. If teachers do not pay extreme attention to words, sooner or later they will fall into glaring contradictions, to remedy which they must invent a series of exceptions. Intrinsic and extrinsic causes are at the origin of such a quagmire: on the one hand, the complexity of the topic, due to the difficulty of finding a definition of aspect, both as a semantic and grammatical category, valid for all languages; on the other hand, the opinion and approach divergence among scholars, who hesitate to recognize at the basis of the Arabic verbal system an aspectual or temporal opposition. Finally, it should be added that the whole debate is grounded on an idea of aspect mirroring the linguistic reality of Slavic languages and which, in hindsight, does not fit well with Arabic.

In this contribution, a definition of verbal aspect will be proposed considering the remarks included in a classic of linguistic studies, Bernard Comrie’s Aspect, and in a short, decidedly less well-known but very important article by the Romanian linguist Coseriu. What follows is an overview of how the topic is introduced within a number of grammars and theoretical texts, the purpose of which is to show the different interpretations given by Arabists regarding aspect and other related features of the verbal system. In the belief that verbal aspect does not constitute an independent grammatical category in Arabic, an interpretation of the system is given as being built on tense as a complex, multidimensional category. In addition to the deictic dimension, serving to situate events with respect to a time reference, Coseriu identifies a second temporal dimension, the ‘plane,’ by which events are presented, in relation with the speech act, as either fully real or placed on a line of diminished reality. By applying the notion of plane to Arabic, an attempt is made to justify certain uses of the so-called “perfect” without referring it to the category of verbal aspect.