Arabic Verbs in Time: Tense and Aspect in Cairene Arabic.

• Author: Stewart, Devin
• Position: Reviews of Books - Book Review

Arabic Verbs in Time: Tense and Aspect in Cairene Arabic. By JOHN C. EISELE. Semitica Viva, vol. 20. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 1999. Pp. xi + 264. DM 78.

Students of Arabic, used to textbooks of the standard written language which present the verb tenses and their meanings in simple and neatly distinguished categories, are invariably puzzled by the widely different senses identical verbal forms may convey in different contexts in Egyptian and other Arabic dialects. For example, the active participle is regularly expected to refer to the present, but in Cairene dialect, for example, wakil, the active participle of the verb 'akal, yakul "to eat" most often means "having eaten" rather than "eating," whereas hasis means "feels" right now. The imperfect verb with bi- prefix varies equally: biyruh means "he goes (generally or usually)" but not "he is going," whereas biyakul usually means "he is eating (right now)." The apparently rigid Arabic verbal system that students have invested much time and effort in mastering has suddenly failed, and this lack of a one-to-one correspondence between morphological form of the verb and time reference is explained in textbooks, if at all, in an incomplete fashion. In this study, Eisele explains these and many other related problems in Cairene Arabic (CA) while at the same time making important contributions to debates over tense and aspect both in general linguistics and in Arabic linguistics in particular.

In this painstaking and clearly written study, Eisele guides the reader through the instances of imprecision, clumsy logic, and inadequate linguistic evidence that have characterized most linguistic studies of tense and aspect. Though he uses the technical terms of modern linguistic theories, he succeeds admirably in making his arguments and critiques transparent to the non-specialist reader. Following an introductory chapter, Eisele provides the linguistic background necessary for an understanding of his analysis of the Egyptian dialectal material. Chapter two is devoted to tense and time reference in English. Chapter three treats theoretical treatments of formal aspect to date. The key point of this chapter is to define three fundamental aspects a verbal form may indicate: event, process, and state. The linguistic data concerning formal aspect in CA is presented in the next three chapters. Chapter four treats the temporal and aspectual characteristics of the basic morphological verb forms; chapter...