Properties of the Arabic language
4.5 Properties of Arabic verbs
Arabic does not have an infinitive form similar to the tenseless form of European languages. Verbs are referred to in the third person masculine singular of the past tense. Thus, the verb kataba encodes ‘to write’ and also the conjugated form ‘he wrote’.
The verbs can be either transitive (mujarrad), transitive or ditransitive (maziid), and are mostly pairs of a transitive form and an intransitive form, but they can also be derivationally related in terms of other morpho-semantic features. Each one of these forms can be derived from the other (4.2.2).
Alongside with main verbs, Arabic shows a variety of verb types:
light verbs are part of complex predications. Although they are autonomous lexical items, they do not predicate like main verbs (Butt, 2010). They have a little semantic content and only contribute general information such as aspect,
mood or tense. In Arabic, as in many other languages, light verbs combine with NPs especially deverbals (masdar), APs, VPs or PPs (65).
(65) a. Light verb + VP
qaama r-rajul-u ya-camalu.
start DEF-man-NOMhe-work
‘The man starts to work.’
b. Light verb + NP
Palqaa l-Pustaad-u muh
˙aad
˙arat-an.
gave DEF-professor-NOMlecture-IND-ACC
‘The professor lectured.’
c. Light verb + PP
qaama l-laacib-u bi-majhuwwd-in kabiir-in.
made DEF-player-NOMwith-effort-IND+GENbig-IND+GEN
‘The player made a big effort.’
d. Light verb + AP jacal-t r-riyaad
˙a-t-u cad
˙alaa-t-a-hu qawiyy-t-an.
made-F-him DEF-sport-F-NOM muscle-PL-ACC-his strong-PL-ACC
‘The sport strengthened his muscles.’
Some of them can be used in alternation to morphemes introducing special pieces of meanings. For instance, the light verb jacala ‘make’ can be used in alternation to the morpheme Pa-which introduces causation (primary and secondary) such as in the verb Pa-ktaba ‘CAUS-write’ (see section (4.2.3)). In other cases, these verbs may be used in a complementary manner with these morphemes. For instance, the verbjacala can be used to express the permissive causation and the morphemic variation to express the coercive causation.
Auxiliary verbsin Arabic provide mainly tense, aspect or negation information to the main verb. These are –among others– kaana ‘be’, ‘s
˙aara’ ‘become’ and
‘laysa’ ‘not-be’. Since Arabic does not dispose of participial forms similar to English or German, the finite form of the main verb is used in combination with the auxiliary. In most cases, this form already possesses temporal information and the auxiliary interacts with it to convey more complex temporal or aspectual information. Thus, in (68), the combination between the auxiliary kaana and the temporal information contributed by the present tense morphemeya- produces the
past progressive, and with the future sa-morpheme in (67), the simple conditional is generated.
(66) kaana ya-quudu sayyaarat-an.
was he+PST-drive car-IND.ACC
‘He was driving the car.’
(67) kaana sa-ya-biicu sayyaarat-a-hu.
was FUT-he-drive car-IND.ACC
‘He would buy his car.’
In other cases, auxiliaries are used in combination with other lexical elements to express other complex tense and aspect information. For instance, in (68), the auxiliary kaana‘be’ is used in combination with the particle qad to express the past perfect.
(68) kaana qad Piˇstaraa syyaarat-an.
had PST buy car-IND.ACC
‘He had bought a car.’
Modal verbs or modal auxiliaries are a sub-class of auxiliary verbs. They contribute modality information to the main verb. This information is of two types:
a. Epistemic modality like possibility, likelihood, certainty or uncertainty.
b. Deontic modality such as ability, permission and duty.
In Arabic, modals are generally of two types. The first type contains verbs like wajaba ‘must’, Pinbagaa ‘must’ and laabudda ‘must’. The first two modals are like the French modal verb falloir ‘must’: They are impersonal and carry a frozen third person singular agreement (ya-jibu,ya-nobagii ‘it-must’) but they can take temporal markers and can be negated (69). The modal laabudda‘it-must’ displays neither agreement nor tense information nor can it be negated (71). The second type of modal verb includes verbs like Paraada ‘want’, ˇsaaPa ‘want/wish’ and Pistat
˙aaca ‘can’, which carry subject agreement as well as temporal marking and can be negated.
(69) yajibu Pan ta-cuud-a Pilaa l-bayt-i.
it-must to you-retrun-ACC to DEF-home-GEN
‘You must go home.’
(70) yajibu Pan ta-cuud-a Pilaa l-bayt-i.
it-must to you-retrun-ACC to DEF-home-GEN
‘You must go home.’
(71) tu-riidu salmaa Pan ta-cuud-a Pilaa l-bayt-i.
F+PRS-want Salma to you-return-ACC to DEF-home-GEN
‘Salma wants to go home.’
Copula: the main copula in Arabic is kaana. However, other verbs like badaa
‘seem’ andd
¯˙ahara ‘seem’ can also be used as copula linking subject and predicate.
As we mentioned in section 4.3 Arabic exhibits cases where the copula is not covertly realised. Many linguistics suggests a copular omission in present tense (Bahloul,1994;Bakir,1980;Fassi Fehrri,1993;Fassi Ferhri,1982) as can be shown in example (72). The presence of a copula becomes obligatory in past and future tense contexts (73).
(72) al-jaww-u jamiil-un l-yawm-a.
DEF-weather-NOM nice-IND-NOM DEF-day-ACC
‘The weather is nice today.’
(73) sa-ya-kuwn al-jaww-u jamiil-an l-yawm-a.
FUT-M-be DEF-weather-ACC nice-IND-NOM DEF-tomorrow-ACC
‘The weather will be nice tomorrow.’
In this dissertation we are only concerned with main verbs and to some extent with modal verbs insofar as they have a more contoured semantic profile, but not with auxiliary verbs, since those are from a semantic point of view not important for our classification.
The next chapter presents an overview of the types of alternations found cross-linguistically. Additionally, it presents the list of alternations used by Levin (1993) to classify English verbs and tests their availability in Arabic.