Le caractère nominal du verbe imperfectif en Arabe Littéraire

Abstract EN

This article investigates the nominal aspect of the imperfective verb in Standard Arabic.

The present paper shows explicitly that this form of the verb shares the same syntactic and distributional properties that of noun.

Such hypothesis has been suggested by some linguists (see Benmamoun (1992), Kayne (1993) and El Khatabi (1996).

Contrary to the perfective verb, the imperfective verb, like noun, is deprived of time feature.

The T-feature is checked by a head X° (NEG, Modal, Aux, V…) which transfers this feature to the whole phrase.

In this case, the embedded imperfective verb, being not encoded for T; hence, is not needed to check his features by raising to T°.

The imperfective verb behaves like a noun (DP) in the sense that it can follow an auxiliary, which is not the case of the perfective verb.

We concentrate our attention particularly on the nominal status of the imperfective verb in Standard Arabic.