The Importance of Grammatical Tense in Arabic An Applied Grammatical Study

Abstract

Praise be to God, a praise that is commensurate with His blessings, rewards His bounty, and protects us from calamities. Peace and blessings be upon Muhammad ibn Abdullah al-Qurashi al-Arabi, the master of Arabs and non-Arabs, the best of those who walk on two feet, and upon his pure and righteous family, his chosen and virtuous companions, and those who followed them in goodness until the Day of Judgment.

Arab grammarians, both ancient and modern, have differed in their understanding of the temporal significance of the verb and its derivatives and verbal nouns. This diverse and significant disagreement reflects the importance of tense in Arabic. The Holy Quran, for example, describes events that occurred before its revelation, the state of the Arabs before and after the Prophet's mission, the stories of past nations, and the events of those nations. It describes each event in its specific time and context, as if it occurred in the reader's or listener's time, due to the precision of the Quranic language in expressing grammatical tense. They also differed in their understanding of the terminology of the verb, its tense, and its function

The tense of the verb (1) in Arabic expresses grammatical time in all its minute details, thus reducing the effort required to understand and conceive of universal time in accordance with the nature of the language that expresses the reality of society. We find that the scholars of Arabic, foremost among them the grammarians of Basra and Kufa, who believed that the morphological form of the verb was insufficient to express grammatical time and its details in the Arabic language, employed other elements that only those of sound nature, discerning intellect, and refined taste could understand, including:

. Linguistic structure.    3. Conjunction2 1-   Inflectional case  . 4- Expressive styles in Arabic.

These elements became an inexhaustible complement and resource to the morphological form of the verb in expressing grammatical time most accurately.

 (1) By this I mean the verb, its verbal noun, and its operative derivatives that have a temporal connotation in speech. See: Al-Ayn by Al-Khalil: 2, 415, 565; and Ma’ani al-Qur’an by Al-Farra’, 1/32, 2/26, and 1/165

Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds, and peace and blessings be upon the Messenger of God, the Seal of the Prophets and Messengers, and upon his family and companions and all who follow them.