Arabic verbs in time

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This work analyzes and explains the distribution of temporal and aspectual properties in the verbal system of Cairene colloquial Arabic at the morphological, syntactic, lexical and pragmatic levels. Arguing against approaches which deny the existence of grammaticalized time reference (or “tense”) in Arabic, this work shows that there is undeniable linguistic evidence that Cairene Arabic has tense. The analysis, based on Hans Reichenbach’s system of tense logic and on David Dowty’s aspectual classification scheme, examines the interaction of the morphosyntactic category of tense with the semantic category of time reference, and then examines the interaction of these temporal categories with the category of aspect, which is considered both a lexical semantic category as well as a morphosyntactic one. This framework allows for the concise description of the syntactic and semantic properties of Cairene verbs, and clarifies a number of problems in Cairene Arabic.