Temporal Interpretation In Standard and Jordanian Arabic

This paper addresses the temporal interpretation in Standard and Jordanian Arabic. Both varieties have two distinctive morphological verbal forms: Perfective and Imperfective, which are grammaticalized forms of Aspect and not Tense. However, they employ direct and indirect linguistic tools to achieve temporal interpretation. The aspectual viewpoints provide pragmatic cues to temporal location of eventualities through their Boundedness properties. In the default case: bounded eventualities are interpreted as past; unbounded ones as present. On the other hand, some pseudo verbs, e.g. ‘aSbaHa ‘be in the morning’ and temporal adverbs, e.g. amsi ‘yesterday’, introduce temporal interpretation lexically, i.e. by their meanings. The similar contribution of these verbs and adverbs is supported by the similar logical forms of sentences including them analyzed within the NeoDavidsonian Framework.