In Tense and Text in Classical Arabic, Michal Marmorstein presents a new discourse-oriented analysis of the indicative tense system in Classical Arabic. Critical of commonly held assumptions regarding the binary structure of the tense system and the perfect-imperfect asymmetry, the author redefines the discussion by analysing the extended syntactic and textual environments in which the paradigm of the indicative forms is used.The study shows that the function of Classical Arabic tenses is determined by the interaction of their inherent grammatical meaning and the overall dialogic, narrative, or generic contexts in which they occur. It also demonstrates the particularizing effect of context, so that temporal and aspectual meanings are always more nuanced, delicate, and pragmatically motivated in actual discourse.

This study undertakes to examine the problem of the tenses in Classical Arabic.

This study undertakes to examine the problem of the tenses in Classical Arabic. While aware of the long tradition which shaped the discussion of this subject, and building, in fact, on some important insights offered by medieval and modern grammarians, this study attempts to redefine the discussion and propose a new analysis of the tenses, based on a functional text-oriented investigation of a large corpus of Classical Arabic prose.

This volume is devoted to the translation of Arabic tenses into English, and English tenses into Arabic. Using a corpus of 1,605 examples, it is remarkably exhaustive in its treatment of the categories and forms of both Standard Arabic and English tenses. As such, it represents a useful reference for translators and linguistics researchers. With 260 example sentences and their translations, the book will be very beneficial to teachers and students of Arabic-English and English-Arabic translation. The book is divided into eight chapters. The first presents the variety of Arabic that will be studied and explains why translation should be a text-oriented process. Chapter Two deals with the differences between tense and aspect in Arabic and English, respectively. Chapter Three proposes a model for translating Standard Arabic perfect verbs into English based on their contextual references. The fourth chapter shows the contextual clues that can assist a translator in selecting the proper English equivalents of Arabic imperfect verbs. Chapter Five deals with the translation of Arabic active participles into English. Translating Arabic passive participles into English is handled in Chapter Six. The seventh chapter tackles the translation of English simple and progressive tenses into Arabic. Chapter Eight provides an approach to the translation of English perfect and perfect progressive tenses into Standard Arabic.

"Based on a doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Oxford in 1983"--Pref.

The linguistic categories of aspect, tense and action are closely interrelated. In the first part of Aspect, Tense and Action in the Arabic dialect of Beirut, Stefan Bruweleit defines the three categories and describes the interplay between them at a metagrammatical level. In the next parts he applies the theoretical findings of the first part to the Arabic dialect of Beirut, investigates the ways temporal, aspectual and actional categories are expressed and shows how to decide whether the verb system of the dialect has to be regarded as aspectual or as temporal. One of the main results of the work is the fact that a thorough understanding of a verb system is only possible through an understanding of the categorial interplay of aspect, tense and action.