Abstract
Understanding Past tense is closely related to the notions of time, tense, and verb-form. Syntactically, it is claimed that most of the verb forms expressing past and present tenses tend to show a somehow correspondence with past and present times respectively. Yet, in the very nature of language use, this is not always the case. Future time, for instance, can be expressed by more than a form, none of which is specifically used for future tense. This behaviour of the verb phrase is common to both Arabic and English languages Past tense, similarly, might refer to past, present, or future times; furthermore, it might refer to simple, progressive, or non-progressive aspects. The present paper attempts to shed some light-beams on these notions in both languages theoretically and practically. Theoretically, it attempts to explicate areas where past verb-forms can easily be used to indicate, past, present, and future, if possible to call them so, tenses. Practically, the two languages tend to show similarities as well as differences that chracterise them or each of them. It is hypothesised that past verb-forms in English and Arabic tend to show certain similarities in relation to the ways these verbs are formed and used to express past and non-past tenses. Besides, what might be syntactically similar could be completely different from the viewpoint of language use. Conclusions and recommendations of the present paper might be of significant to linguisticans, teachers of Arabic and English, and translators to and fro the two languages.
Highlights
The term 'tense' can be defined as a grammatical category that serves to locate an event or situation in time. It encompasses two aspects: a morphological aspect, namely a system of tenses encoded in the verb-form morphologically and a semantic aspect dealing with the temporal location of the events depicted in one or more sentences (Hackmack, n.d.: online)
Tense has been found to be a functional rather than formal category which is a characteristic of the verb phrase within its sentence (Reishaan and Ja'far, 2008: 110)(1)
It is hypothesized here that (1) past verb-forms in English and Arabic tend to show certain similarities in relation to the ways these verbs are formed, (2)such verb-forms could be used to express both past and non-past tenses, and (3) what might be syntactically similar could be completely different from the viewpoint of language use
Summary
The term 'tense' can be defined as a grammatical category that serves to locate an event or situation in time. It encompasses two aspects: a morphological aspect, namely a system of tenses encoded in the verb-form morphologically and a semantic aspect dealing with the temporal location of the events depicted in one or more sentences (Hackmack, n.d.: online). An additional possibility is the use of other linguistic elements, for example temporal adverbs such as yesterday or soon or prepositional phrases such as before or in two weeks These expressions do not have the same status as tense: they are lexical, not grammatical expressions of temporality. This study limits itself to a syntactic-semantic approach to the full verb-forms whereas primary auxiliary verbs, in terms of Quirk el. al. (1985) model, have been treated complimentarily to tenses
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