Negation as Evidence of Temporal and Aspectual Functions on Verbal Inflections and their Syntactic Representation in the Structure of Complex Tense Clauses in MSA

Abstract

One of the main concerns for researchers who have been studying Arabic within the modern syntactic theory is the functional projections of the two verb inflections. Debate has long prevailed as to whether these verbs encode temporal and/or aspectual information. A straight consequence of this debate is on the syntactic representation of periphrastic tense constructions. Since a complex tense structure encompasses two inflected verbs, an auxiliary and a lexical verb, the debate continues on whether they construct a bi-clausal or a mono-clausal structure. A majority of the previous studies has focused in their analyses on the contexts on which these verbs are the only possible carriers of the temporal and aspectual information but little attention has been paid to the contexts on which other elements encode this information. Since negation in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) can be tensed, this dissertation aims to systematically investigate the evidence provided from negation to the debate. Evidence from negation suggests that the perfective verb carries past tense and perfective aspect. This contrasts with the imperfective verb, which is a default verb that does not inherently encode tense nor aspect. In addition, a corpus -search confirms that complex tense structures project two TPs where two possible positions for tensed negation are found. However, these two TP projections are functional categories for one lexical verb, which, afterwards, supports the mono-clausal analysis.