Tense and aspect in Arabic in comparison to English

Abstract

This paper discusses tense and aspect in Arabic in comparison to English. It follows an analytical approach considering modern theories of tense and aspect. It rejects the perceived notion that Arabic is an aspectual language and argues based on Tammam Hassan's distinction between morphological tense and grammatical tense that Arabic distinctively expresses both tense and aspect. It has three main tenses: Present, past, and future; and that like English has aspects connected to tenses such as the continuous, perfect, and perfect continuous, in addition to other aspects related to the semantic nature of verbs. The importance of the study lies not only in its contribution to the ongoing debate about tense and aspect in Arabic, but in presenting a detailed analysis that could be useful for pedagogical approaches and translation tasks.