الفعل العربي وصيغه الزمنية في ››جزء عَمَّ››

Abstract

The question of how the various forms of the verb in Arabic express time is clearly of great importance to those interested in the evolution of the grammatical description of the Arabic verb and in solving the mystery of language and understanding the way it works. This is the topic of my Magistère research work in which I have avoided plain theorization and have opted for text analysis. There is no text as precise as that of the Quran, the first text ever in Arabic, to understand the phenomenon of time in the Arabic language. The part “Juz‟ Amma” in the Quran is the subject matter of this study. This part is suitable as a case study of the whole Quran as its chapters (Suras) vary in length, on the one hand, and in the themes related to faith in particular, to doomsday, to repentance and punishment and to the tales of ancient nations. At the outset, a central question is asked: What are the various semantic forms of the Arabic verb in the „Amma‟ part? This question generates the following secondary questions: Does the semantic value of each form in the various contexts of this part of the Quran‟s text concord with that determined by the grammarians? Is verb form the only tense determinant in this part? What is the effect of the context and affixes (prefixes and suffixes) in the tense value of the form as it appears in this part of the Quran? A descriptive methodology is followed to achieve the aims of this research using statistically supported analysis in every single context of occurrence. The research work may look overloaded with charts but its nature and its aims do require such means. Historical methodology has been deliberately avoided even in the theoretical introduction of the first chapter as such an approach has been deemed inefficient in showing the reality of the verb and its connection with time, except for the chronological listing of the scholars mentioned in the two parts of this chapter. To answer the central question as well as the secondary ones, a research scheme had to be designed in a way to achieve the aims and to cover all aspects of the problem. The first chapter is a literature review which is of a certain length because of the nature of this research. First, it deals with the notion of the verb from a semantic point of view and its characteristics. Then, it focuses on the notion of the tense in its relation with the verb and its various classes and connotations. The second chapter is devoted to investigating „faala‟ (and its subdivisions) as a grammatical form or what the ancient grammarians called the past tense. The third chapter describes the forms „yafaalou‟ (and its subdivisions) and „ifaal‟ that the ancient grammarians called respectively the present tense and the imperative. The imperative tense is not dealt with in a separate chapter in order to keep all chapters balanced and because the imperative tense is not as detailed as the two other tenses. In chapters two and three, the verb forms are carefully investigated in all the Suras of each section (hizb) by determining their meanings in each context. In the last section, however, there is just an outline of the most noticeable phenomena. This is followed by a series of graphs that display what forms of „faala, „yafaalou‟ and „ifaal‟ are contained in this section and in the last one. General observations are made as to the meaning of each of these forms and the influence of the affixes, the tools, the context and the root on the semantic value of these forms, in what scholars have called „the grammatical tense‟. The research work ends with a conclusion that summarizes the results reached after description.