ABSTRACT
The most prevalent approach to the characteristic features of Arabic inflectional morphology has been to delineate: first, its consonantal root basis as the origin of all inflectional and derivational morphology; and second, the semantic opposition between its two basic verbal forms: the Perfect and the Imperfect as they are generally called.1 This is reflected in the contemporary works of McCarthy (1979, 1982), Travis (1979), Fischer (2002), Holes (2004) among many others. In this section, we will first outline the core of this approach, then examine its extent on both verbal forms: the Perfect and the Imperfect.
