Contrastive Study of Aspect in English and Arabic

Abstract

The idea of this paper is to compare (albeit briefly) "aspect" as a grammatical category commonly associated with the verb phrase in both English and Arabic. In view of the fact that much has been written on this category in English (cf. Allen, 1966; Comrie, 1976; Joos, 1964; Leech, 1971; Palmer, 1974; Quirk, et. al., 1985; Zandvoort, 1962) no attempt will be made to describe its status or uses in English. However, a brief review of the contrast between perfective and imperfective verbs in Arabic is necessary for the contrastive analysis (between English and Arabic perfective verbs) which is the main objective of this paper..