ABSTRACT
There is a small group of verbs in Arabic that are used with equational sentences
to express meanings related to being, becoming or their negation. Traditional
Arabic grammarians labeled this group ةَصِقان لاعفَأ “incomplete or defective verbs,” primarily because of their form. Their use is restricted to certain domains. A
commonly used member of this group is the verb َناك “to be,” which is employed in equational sentences to state a proposition in the past tense. It can also be
on the identical behavior that these verbs exhibit when used in equational/
nominal sentences. The most striking grammatical feature of َناك and its sisters is that they turn common nouns and adjectives functioning as predicates into the
accusative case. َناك is used with verbs in the present tense to express an action that happened at a point of time in the past (see Chapter 18 on past continuous).
