ABSTRACT
The main contribution of the book resides in three groups of chapters. The first group consists of Chapter 2, where a discussion of clause structure unveils common insights of two different schools of thought: one syntactically oriented, the other semantico-pragmatic and discourse-based. The second group consists of Chapters 4, 5, and 6. There we conducted a semantico-pragmatic and discourse analysis of the basic verbal forms: the Perfect and the Imperfect, the main components of the verbal system in Arabic. This investigation included a detailed analysis of the modal element QAD when it occurs with the Perfect, yielding a complex structure we called the “Compound Perfect.” The third and last group includes Chapters 7 and 8, where a syntactic analysis of the two verbal and nominal clauses in Arabic is presented. The overall thrust of these chapters stresses the fact that the basic semantic features of the Arabic verb combine the ATM categories of Taxis and Aspect. As for the category of Tense, we have shown that, although it is not a necessary feature of the verb (i.e. it is subsidiary), it is an obligatory feature of the clause. This claim is largely instantiated through a detailed investigation of the basic constituents of the Arabic verbal system (e.g. the paradigms of the Perfect, Imperfect and the assertive modal QAD). In simple declarative contexts, for example, both verbal forms, the Perfect and the Imperfect, host Taxis and Aspect features, as evidenced by both their invariant values (e.g. Taxis-Aspect interpretations) and their syntactic structures (e.g. their ability to move to Tax-Aspo). In negative contexts, however, while Taxis and Aspect show close ties to the verb, Tense gets attached to negation, and similarly it attaches to conditional particles and to auxiliaries. In sum, the overall results show that while Tense is certainly present within the Arabic clause, the value of this category is less likely to take part in the values of the invariant of both the Perfect and the Imperfect.
