PEOPLE: International Journal of Social Sciences

ISSN 2454-5899

Alasmari et al.
Volume 3 Issue 3, pp.1604-1615
Date of Publication: 20th February 2018
DOI-https://dx.doi.org/10.20319/pijss.2018.33.16041615
This paper can be cited as: Alasmari, J, Watson, J.C.E & Atwell, E. (2018). A Contrastive Study of
the Arabic and English Verb Tense and Aspect A Corpus-Based Approach. PEOPLE: International
Journal of Social Sciences, 3(3), 1604-1615.

A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF THE ARABIC AND ENGLISH

VERB TENSE AND ASPECT
A CORPUS-BASED APPROACH
Jawharah Alasmari
School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds, The United Kingdom
Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, Saudi Arabia
ml14jsna@leeds.ac.uk

Janet C.E. Watson

School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds, The United Kingdom
j.c.e.watson@leeds.ac.uk

Eric Atwell
School of Computing, University of Leeds, The United Kingdom
E.S.Atwell@leeds.ac.uk

Abstract
There is so far only limited research that applies a corpus-based approach to the study of the
Arabic language. The primary purpose of this paper is therefore to explore the verb systems
of Arabic and English using the Quranic Arabic Corpus, focussing on their similarities and
differences in tense and aspect as expressed by verb structures and their morphology.
Understanding the use of different verb structures, participles, and auxiliary verbs that are
used to indicate time and actions may be one way to improve translation quality between
Arabic and English. In order to analyse these forms, a sub-corpus of two Arabic verb forms
and their translations in English were created. The Arabic verbs and their English
translations were then compared and analysed in terms of syntactic and morphological
features. The following English translations of the Quran were used: Sahih International,
Pickthall, Yusuf Ali, Shakir, Muhammad Sarwar, Mohsin Khan, Arberry. The analysis shows
a considerable disagreement between the Arabic verb tense and aspect, and their translations.
This suggests that translating Arabic verbs into English is fraught with difficulty. The

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analysis of the corpus data can be categorised and calculated and can then potentially be
used to improve the translation between the two languages.
Keywords
Arabic Verb, Verb Corpus, Translation

1. Introduction
Various studies have examined the differences between the verb system used in
Arabic and those used in other languages (Eisele, 1990; Zollmann Venugopal, & Vogel, 2006,
Alasmari, Watson, & Atwell, 2017). Understanding the correspondence between a verb form
and the concept of time—past, present or future—is in fact one of the most important aspects
of any language. Much attention has therefore been given to this in the study of Arabic.
Additionally, grammarians of Arabic and English have made numerous attempts to provide
an understanding of the differences between the completeness and incompleteness of actions,
the points of action, and period’s duration (Reishaan & Ja’far, 2008).
To this day, some contemporary linguists criticise early grammarians for their sole
focus on the verb form to indicate time in Arabic. They also argue that the lack of attention to
contextual elements that define the verb—in terms of tense, aspect and mood—is one of the
main challenges when translating between Arabic and English (Reishaan & Ja’far, 2008;
Eisele, 1999; El-Sadek, 2014). In order to examine the use of tense, aspect, and modality of
verb systems—to aid the translation of Arabic into English—steps must be taken to respond
appropriately to the inflection elements and their rules. In this regard, Carstairs-McCarthy
(2002) suggests that systematic comparisons of the grammatical characteristics of languages
should address morphology and syntax in tandem, and acknowledge their relative importance
for forming lexical items in particular.
1.1 Research issue
As the Arabic verb has not commonly been considered from a corpus-based
approach— although this approach has been found to be a useful resource in investigating the
syntax or semantics of a language (Alasmari et al., 2017) —the principal objectives of the
study are as follows:
 Account for the verb systems of Arabic and English, paying particular attention to
their similarities and differences using the Quranic Arabic corpus to reveal details
relating to tense and aspect as expressed by the verb forms under investigation.
 Provide some details of the translation challenges in an effort to improve the
translation of verbs between Arabic and English.

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2. Verbs in Arabic
The Arabic language has a unique verb system which differs from that used in English.
In Arabic, the verb is the most important part of a sentence, as the verb conveys both action
and time. In Arabic verbs, tense and aspect can be represented using the rules of inflectional
morphology (Truck, 2010); therefore, only details of morphological inflection will be
discussed in this research.
2.1 Inflectional verbal morphology
The inflectional verbal morphology of Arabic distinguishes between a suffix
conjugation and a prefix conjugation, generally referred to by linguists as the perfect and the
imperfect. The suffix conjugation typically refers to the past tense, while the prefix
conjugation typically refers to the present tense.
The grammatical categories relevant for verbs are person (first, second, third), number
(singular, dual, plural), and gender (masculine, feminine). These categories are realised in the
suffixes of the suffix conjugation and in the prefixes (and suffixes) of the prefix conjugation,
as the examples in Tables 1 and 2 shows:
Table 1: The suffixes of the Arabic suffix conjugation

kataba “To write”

‘I wrote’ katabtu ‘we wrote’ katabna

‘you (m.) wrote’ katabta ‘he wrote’ kataba

‘you (m. pl.) wrote’ katabtum ‘they (pl.) wrote’ katabuu
‘you (f. pl.) wrote” katabtunna ‘they (f.pl.) wrote’ katabna

Table 2: The prefixes and suffixes of the prefix conjugation for the Arabic verb ‘to write’

kataba “To write”

‘I write’ aktubu ‘we write’ nadrusu

‘you (f.)
taktubiina ‘she writes’ taktubu
write’

‘you (m. pl.) write’ taktubuuna ‘they (pl.)write’ yaktubuuna

‘you (dual) write’ ’ taktubaani ‘they (dual) write’ yaktubaani

2.2 Tense and aspect in Arabic

Among linguists and grammarians investigating the Arabic language, the verb
system—or the denotation of verbal forms in Arabic—has long been subject to debate;

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namely, the debate on whether Arabic has a tense system or an aspect system. Wright (1967)
attributes the origin of the debate to several historic and theoretical factors. Wright (Ibid)
maintains that he was not able to understand clearly what was being expressed in terms of
perfective, imperfective, or simple aspects in any of the tenses. Odilavadze (2010) also
suggests that the traditional orientalist views of Arabic having 'aspect' rather than 'tense’ have
influenced some scholarly approaches to the categories of ‘tense’ and ‘aspect’. Ryding (2005)
explains ‘past’ and ‘present’ via a timeline when using the term ‘tense’, which can be less
confusing for learners, while some linguists such as Eisele (1990) suggest that the ‘past’ and
‘present’ distinguish between actions that are past and non-past. New descriptions have also
been introduced to define the terms ‘aspect’ and ‘tense’ (Bubenik, 2011).
The debate amongst contemporary linguists on whether Arabic is tense-specific or
aspect-specific continues to this day. El-Sadek (2014) considers Arabic a tense language with
two finite forms, one that is prefixed and one that is un-prefixed, an idea which has also been
considered by linguists such as Fehri (2012) and Binnick (1991). Brustad (1991) notes that
the perfective form fa’al, the imperfective yaf’al and the participle all define actions, events
and states, each from a different viewpoint. In line with the views of tense-aspectualist
linguists, El-Sadek (2014) confirms that "both tense and aspect can be expressed verbs in
ECA, the verb carries tense only in simple tense forms, while the main predicate (such as the
auxiliary k¯an) marks tense, in compound tense constructions and aspect is marked by the
following lexical verb".
In their analysis of Arabic and English verb tense and aspect using Google translate,
Alasmari et al (2017) confirm that perfect and imperfect aspects in Arabic verb can be
employed to express multiple tenses/aspect based on sentence elements.

3. Verbs in English
In English, verb forms provide information about events or actions; for example, time,
period, relation to another event or action, and so on. Aarts & Haegeman (2006) explain that
in order to express or demonstrate tense, voice; moods and aspect, helping verbs are used. For
example, the third person singular uses the auxiliary verbs ‘is’, ‘does’ and ‘has’.
In English, the main forms of most verbs are the present form, the past form which for
regular verbs is indicated by d, and -ed and the present progressive form made by ending a
word with -ing: e.g. watch, watched, and watching (Palmer, 2016).

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3.1 Inflectional morphology

English is considered to have weak verbal inflections compared to Latin, Greek,
Spanish and other languages. According to Arista (2012), eight types of English inflectional
morphemes are commonly used. These eight types are plural, possessive, comparative,
superlative, 3rd singular present agreement, past tense, past participle and present participle.
The grammatical functions of these eight morphemes and respective examples are provided
below.

Table 3: English Morphemes

Morpheme Grammatical Functions Examples

Plural Showing things as more than one Cars, houses, chocolates.

Possessive Describes the ownership London’s, John’s, Maria’s.

Comparative Details the comparison Faster, whiter, cooler.

Superlative Expresses the quality Fastest, whitest, coolest.

3rd Person Singular Present Agreement Third person singular is agreed with. Walks, pulls, waits.
Present tense is focused.

Past Tense Reflects the previous actions. Ran, dropped, cheated.

Past Participle Past participle is focused. Chosen, proven, given.

Present Participle Present participle is focused. Running, dancing, sleeping.

3.2 Tense and aspect in English

The English language has two tenses, present and past. According to Denison (2013),
the past tense and the present tense are the verb tenses used to indicate the time period. There
are no future tense forms of English verbs. The future tense is formed through use of ‘will’
plus the unmarked verb (Dürich 2006).
In terms of aspect, there are two basic grammatical aspects: perfective and
imperfective. In English, the term past progressive is used to indicate “imperfect”. Imperfect
and perfect aspects can be used in conjunction, for example: I was walking (imperfect) when
you arrived (perfect). It was windy (imperfect) when you travelled (perfect). The perfect
aspect tends to be realised by a past tense form, and the imperfect aspect tends to be realised
by a present/future tense. The perfect is used to indicate completed action, while the
imperfect is used to indicate continuous action (Wikander, 2014).

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4. Methodology
In this research, only the imperfect aspect was considered as follows:
 Using Excel software, 176 sentences from the verb corpus were analysed and
calculated regarding verb structures from the root qaf waw lām ‫‘ قول‬to say’, from
ُُ ‫ يقُو‬yaqūlu ‘he says’, ُ ‫ نَقُو ُل‬naqūlu ‘we say’
which the following forms are derived: ُ ‫ل‬
and َُُ‫ يقُولُون‬yaqūlūna ‘they say’.
 59 verb structures that contain the third person masculine singular form and 12
sentences that contain the first person plural were selected.
 105 sentences indicate third person masculine plural, and 170 sentences represent the
use of the bare imperfect form ‫ ُ َيقُو ُل‬yaqūlu ‘says’ when used alone, without any
preceding words that can change its aspectual function.
 Different colours were used to distinguish between translations of multiple
tenses/aspects as the following table shows (Table 4).
Table 4: Examples of verb structures and their translations using Excel
The verb The verse Sahih International 1 Pickthall 2

present only that we present

naqūlu/َ‫َنقُو ُُل‬ ُ‫ون‬ ُْ َ‫ِإنَّ َماُقَوْ لُنَاُ ِلش َْيءٍ ُ ِإذَاُأَ َر ْدنَاهُُأ‬
ُ ‫نُنَقُو َُلُلَهُُ ُك ْنُفَ َي ُك‬ but that we say
simple say simple

present present
liyaqūlūُ/ُ‫ِليَقُولُوا‬ ‫علَي ِْهمُْم ِْنُبَ ْينِنَا‬ َّ ‫ْضُ ِليَقُولُواُأَ َٰ َه ُؤ ََلءِ ُ َم َّن‬
َ ُُ‫ُاَّلل‬ َ ‫َك َٰذَ ِلكَ ُفَتَنَّاُبَ ْع‬
ُ ٍ ‫ض ُهمُْبِبَع‬ might say say
simple simple

present
ُ waliyaqūlūُ/ُ‫َو ِليَقُولُوا‬ ُِ ‫َو َك َٰذَ ِلكَ ُنُص َِرفُ ُ ْاْليَا‬
َُ‫تُ َو ِليَقُولُواُد ََرسْت‬ will say future may say
simple

The table illustrates the verb structures which indicate the first and third person masculine
singular/plural imperfect verbs, and the frequency of the translated forms in the Quranic verb
sub-corpus.

5. Analysis and results

In the analysis, some examples of the verb form in Arabic and their most common
English translations were taken into consideration, as the following table shows.
Table 5: The verb translations

Quranic Examples
176 Verb translations
Sahih Pickt Yusuf Sha Muhammad Mohsin Arbe Tot
International hall Ali kir Sarwar Khan rry al
Present Simple 94 106 103 100 100 98 89 690
Past Simple 5 5 2 5 8 5 5 35
Future 59 48 41 46 40 50 57 341

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Perfect (Would, Used To, May,

Might, Should) 2 4 9 14 2 7 2 40
Passive 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 2
Infinitive 0 1 8 3 0 6 0 18
Present Perfect 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 2
Comprehensive Translation Of
Meaning 0 0 3 0 12 0 0 15
Conditional Perfect 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1
Present Continue 4 3 0 0 1 1 2 11
Present Perfect Continuous 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 2
Noun 9 8 10 7 11 7 19 71
Past Continuous 1 1 0 0 0 0 2 4
122
Total 176 176 176 176 176 176 176 9

As indicated in Table 5, while the Arabic imperfect aspect of the verb, which
comprises suffixes conjugation and prefixes conjugation to indicate person, number, gender,
or tense, was solely used to indicate time/action, several of the English translations indicate
the tense of the verb; for example, more than half of the Arabic examples use the future tense;
the second section of translations in the table is in the English future tense.
Analysis shows that the Arabic imperfect aspect is used to indicate the future tense,
for example when the contexts refer to actions in the future, especially when the context is a
description of the events of Judgement Day.
The morphemic composition of a verb in its syntactic context is significant here in
order to consider verb tense and aspect. For example, after the CONJ – prefixed conjunction
fa- ‘and’, the verb indicates future tense, with respect to the verb forms that precede it in the
sentence. Generally speaking, when a verb is in future tense, verbs that follow must agree
with the closer verb in terms of tense after conjunctions such as fa-, wa- ‘and’, aw- ‘or’ etc.
This agreement is essential to clarify meaning and to sequence actions in a sentence with
multiple verb forms, for example, “Zaid did not study and play yesterday”.
However, sometimes the imperfect aspect can be used to indicate future tense if the
form is further clarified with particles. For example, the Arabic imperfect aspect is used to
indicate action in the future as the following example shows. The Sahih International
translation was used here to consider the meaning and translation of the examples.

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The 44th verse of chapter 14 (sūratib'rāhīm)

Sahih International: And, [O Muhammad], warn the people of a Day when the punishment will
come to them and those who did wrong will say, "Our Lord, delay us for a short term; we will
answer Your call and follow the messengers." [But it will be said], "Had you not sworn, before, that
for you there would be no cessation?

It appears that the imperfect aspect in Arabic indicates the actions in the future, and
the actions will be expected to be continuous or repetitive.
The Arabic imperfect aspect can be constructed to indicate future tense if it is used in
context with specific particles, such as the emphatic prefix lām. These positions have been
approved by Arab grammarians such as Al-Zajjāji, & Ibn Al-Sirāj. Consider the following
example:

The tenth verse of chapter 11 (sūrathūd)

Sahih International: But if we give him a taste of favor after hardship has touched him, he will
surely say, "Bad times have left me." Indeed, he is exultant and boastful -

The use of the conditional case using the particle ‘In ‫ إن‬, in conjunction with the past
form followed by the present form in the clause with the emphatic prefix lām in ‫ َلئن‬, is to
express that an action is repeated, usual, or that the action takes place regularly. In this case,
it can be suggested that the verbs may be translated into English by using future tense, that is,
‘will’ or ‘shall’.
An analysis of the verb sub-corpus also suggests that the Arabic imperfect aspect can
be used to express a past action with the prefix ‘iḏ ‫ إذ‬T – time adverb. The prefix ‘iḏ ‫ إذ‬is
thus used primarily to indicate actions that have taken place in the past; it can be translated
into English as ‘when’. Consider the following examples:

The 47th verse of chapter 17 (sūrat l-isrā)

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Sahih International: We are most knowing of how they listen to it when they listen to you and [of]
when they are in private conversation, when the wrongdoers say, "You follow not but a man
affected by magic."

In this example, the verses tell stories of events that have occurred in the past by using
the imperfect form to mark the moment of speech between the speakers; conveyance of an
exchange that has taken place in the past is accomplished with eloquence by using the context
to indicate the actual time, which in this case is past tense.
As the corpus shows, the imperfect aspect َ‫ يقُولُون‬yaqūlūna ‘they say’, which refers to
the third person masculine plural, was used to indicate the present perfect progressive tense,
indicating that an action has been repeated over a period of time in the past, and is continuing
in the present, and/or will continue in the future. However, different translations were
provided, using, for example, present simple and present continuous. Consider the following:

The 73rd verse of chapter 5 (sūrat l-māidah)

Sahih International: They have certainly disbelieved who say, "Allah is the third of three." And
there is no god except one God. And if they do not desist from what they are saying, there will surely
afflict the disbelievers among them a painful punishment.

After comparison of the original with the example translations (not limited to the examples
described here), it is possible to conclude the following:
1. English has multiple grammatical class forms for tenses and aspect, the
perfective/imperfective.
2. Arabic and English are similar in indicating tense through morphological features.
3. Even though Arabic has only two aspectual forms, perfect and imperfect, Arabic and
English have sub-classes of aspect, such as progressive, predictive, habitual, and generic,
indicated through the use of particle, main verb or auxiliary. See in the following some
examples:
 The Arabic imperfect aspect can be used to convey the present continuous (when an
action takes a long time to complete or has a continuous effect).
 The Arabic imperfect aspect can be used for an activity that is happening at the
moment of speaking.
 The Arabic imperfect aspect can be used to refer to planned events or future
arrangements. In English, this happens when the verb refers to a future action.

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 The Arabic imperfect aspect can be used to express a habitual action.

 Based on grammatical rules, the Arabic imperfect aspect can be used to refer to an
action that has happened in the past when it is used with the prefix ’iḏ / T – time
adverb, which is typically used to indicate past tense.
 The Arabic imperfect aspect can be used to indicate the future tense if it contains the
EMPH – emphatic prefix lām, which is typically used to indicate future tense.
 The Arabic imperfect aspect can be used to indicate an action repeated over a period
of time in the past, which is continuing in the present, and/or will continue in the
future. In English, this is the present perfect continuous.
 The examples of the sub-corpus indicate that the Arabic imperfect aspects can
sometimes be used to express the future, past and present tense/aspect without the use
of particles or auxiliaries.
 In some examples, the Arabic imperfect aspect does not describe an action related to
time; it is solely a description of the situation.

6. Conclusion
The analysis demonstrates that there are significant differences between Arabic and
English morphological rules and word structure, particularly with respect to tense and aspect.
In Arabic and in English, the imperfect aspect is used for completed actions in relation to the
present moment, a moment in the future or a moment in the past. These results confirmed
previous results by, for instance, Alasmari et al (2017), and Al-Aswad (1983). The seemingly
widespread belief held by translators that Arabic verbs are narrowed to limited indications of
past, present and future is therefore not correct (Fayyad, 1997). In order to address this
misconception, syntactic and morphological instructions must be given to the translator.
Occasionally, problems in Arabic-English translation may also arise due to lack of
understanding of morphological conditions such as prefixation vs. suffixation, different
meanings of individual forms, and the recognition of particular tools and auxiliary verbs in
contexts.
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