ABSTRACT
Arabic has been an interesting case where the verb ambiguously expresses tense and aspectual information. This raised some debate among modern linguists on whether the verb morphology marks tense or whether it only marks aspect, whereas tense is denoted through syntactic and pragmatic means. This chapter reviews various arguments from the literature showing that both the perfective verb, which is usually associated with past tense, and the imperfective, usually associated with present tense, are actually not limited to past and present tense contexts respectively. It focuses on simple tense and presents an analysis, within the Generative tradition, that tries to reconcile the lack of temporal morphology on the verb with the availability of semantic temporal interpretation. The chapter details gears to complex tense, discusses its properties, and provides an analysis that offers a possible explanation for the structure of the different compound tense clauses and their different tense interpretation.
