Semantic Shift in the Meaning of the Arabic word tamma

Abstract

Grammaticalisation of lexical items takes place gradually, and to track the changes a word undergoes, a historical corpus is needed. This paper investigates the changes the Arabic word “tamma” underwent. The corpus provided by King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST Arabic Corpus) is used in this study because the search engine for this corpus offers the ability for searches to be time-restricted. Thus, the development of the verb “tamma” was tracked. It was found that this verb is used in the corpus in two ways: as a polysemous lexical verb with three meanings: “to be completed,” “to occur,” and “to remain.” The second use of the verb is as an auxiliary that indicates the completion of the action of the verbal noun it precedes. An important finding is that this use, contrary to common belief, occurred in Arabic during the period between 1101 AD and 1200 AD and is not a modern introduction into Arabic. In order to explain this change, the paper investigates how this verb is translated to English and what grammatical function it has in recent use. This paper also suggests that the verb “tamma” could be defective.