Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 4 (2000) - The University of ...

K ALJENAIE
causative form is basically the weak radical of that root as elaborated
above.
3. Class V: is often considered a reflexive counterpart of Class II, where
prefixes t- to Class II verb or sometimes from Class I. For example
sabba! ‘to give a bath’ and the conjugation of that verb is tesabba! ‘to
take a bath’. Class V renders the intransitive equivalent of the Class II.
2.2 Tense
Tense is a complex issue; grammarians have used terms like perfect (which
denotes completed action) and imperfect (which denotes incomplete
action) (Bulos 1965; M.E.C.A.S. 1965; Mitchelle 1962). It is not easy to
know whether there is an aspectual or tense distinction in Kuwaiti Arabic.
Holes (1990) acknowledges that there is an overlap between past tense and
perfect aspect. Lyovin (1997) also indicates that perfect is used for the
past, while imperfect is used for both present and past, that is for ongoing
actions where there is no certain end. Benamamoun (2000:24) concludes
“A long debate and still unresolved issues within Arabic linguisitics has
revolved around the information (features) that these two forms (perfective
and imperfective) carry. The specific question is whether, in addition to
agreement, these two forms carry temporal aspectual features”. In this
study the investigator will use the term Tense (Present and past) instead of
Aspect since it is an undecided issue.
“Arabic has a rich verb morphology involving a large number of
inflectional patterns as well as a number of fairly productive derivational
ones” (Lyovin 1997:209). In general, verbs in Arabic are marked with
tense and agreement (past/present), mood (imperative/indicative), voice
(passive/active); these features occur as suffixes or prefixes or both.
Moreover, Arabic has a regular paradigm of person, gender and number
formatives (as shown in Tables 1-2 below). However, the paradigm is
smaller in Kuwaiti Arabic than in MSA; there is no morphological mood
distinction as in MSA. Moreover, there are no dual markers or gender
plural distinctions as in MSA. This could be due to the gradual shift from
the Classical language to the present dialects. Essentially in Arabic there is
no infinitive form in the manner that exists in English (Bulos 1965) and
every verb form includes the stem and affixes which are of three types:
suffixes as in the past/ perfect, or prefixes, or a combination of prefix and
suffix. The present/imperfect tense is characterised by the second and third
types. The inflected affixes signal more than one thing at the same time,
Tense, person, number and gender of the subject. The affixes may have
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