The syntax and semantics of taxis, aspect, tense and modality in standard Arabic

Most approaches to verbal grammatical categories, constituents of verbal systems, rely on either semantic-pragmatic or syntactic analyses. This research bridges the gap between these two distinct approaches through a detailed analysis of Taxis, Aspect, Tense and Modality in Standard Arabic. This is accomplished by showing: (i) first, some basic theoretical concerns shared by both schools of thought, (ii) second, the extent to which semantic structures and invariant meanings mirror syntactic representations. The many areas covered include the underlying structure of clauses, where a binary structure (cf. Fillmore 1968) with a Modality and a Proposition constituents, is preferred over an NP Aux VP type approach, the identification of Taxis-Aspect morphology; the invariant meaning of the Perfect and the Imperfect; the functioning of the modal particle QAD as an ATM element; and the syntactic derivation of both verbal and nominal clauses.;Finally, the results of this study suggest that the syntactic derivation of Taxis-Aspect and Tense is best achieved through base-generating the two categories as distinct phrasal projections which, when they are specified for their feature values, force the thematic verb to attach to them, yielding the verbal complex (taxis (aspect (verb))), and whenever possible (tense (taxis (aspect (verb)))), but result in a nominal clause, when they are not specified for their feature value, or lack certain types of features. As for the modal QAD, it is shown to belong to a larger category called Assertive Phrase, which contains negation as well.;The findings indicate that the basic constituents of the verbal system in Arabic, namely the Perfect and the Imperfect, are systematically differentiated through their invariant semantic features in a markedness relation. Thus, the Perfect is marked and signals both (+anteriority) and (+dimensionalization), and the Imperfect is unmarked and thus may signal (...