Abstract
Abstract In the previous chapter, I focused on the morphology of tense in Arabic. I explored the temporal properties of the perfective and imperfective verbs and concluded that only the former carries temporal features—namely, abstract past tense features. The imperfective verb, by contrast, is not specified for any temporal features. In this chapter, I turn to the syntax of verbs in the three dialects studied in the previous chapter. I will explore the formal features of the elements that occupy the tense projection and argue that the catgeorial feature matrices of these elements are not uniform. In particular, I argue that the categorial features of the past tense and the present tense are not the same. This, in turn, will help account for key syntactic differences between the present tense and the past tense to be discussed in chapter 4.
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