Grammaticalized vs. Lexicalized Aspect: A Comparative Study of the English and Arabic Aspectual Systems and Their Pedagogical Implications for Arabic Learners of English

Abstract

Since the term Aspect tends to be less familiar to students of linguistics than other grammatical terms, like Tense and Mood, the present study has tried to investigate the syntactic and semantic description of aspect in English and Arabic. This unfamiliarity is particularly acute for Arabic-speaking students, given that Aspect was never genuinely studied, named, or introduced into Arabic grammatical tradition as an independent category — the sole notable attempt being a single section in Tammam Hassan's al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya Maʿnāhā wa-Mabnāhā, where Hassan proposed al-jiha (الجهة) as an Arabic equivalent of Aspect — and has remained entirely absent from Arabic language curricula and pedagogical methodologies to this day. Following the recommendation of Dr. Nasser Hajjaj, founder of Vernacularism (2024), this paper proposes al-ṭawr (الطور) as a more precise and pedagogically accessible Arabic equivalent, on the grounds that the root ṭ-w-r consistently denotes the internal condition of a process in itself — independently of external clock time — which is precisely the conceptual core of Aspect, while the root j-w-h carries competing meanings that undermine terminological precision.

To achieve this aim, it is hypothesized that Arabic and English differ in expressing aspect. The present study aims for grammatically describing the aspects in both languages, and identifying the similarities and differences between them to find out which type of aspect is more problematic than the other that many Arabic-speaking students of English suffer from. The researchers has revealed that there are two grammatical marked aspects in English: progressive and perfective aspect. Progressive aspect is clearly aspectual in its semantics, but perfective aspect appears to have a dual nature, being aspectual in some uses but a kind of past tense in others, while Arabic has no specific aspectual verb morphology — it uses two simple forms (perfect and imperfect) to express the basic grammatical distinction. Progressive aspect in English is grammaticalized, while in Arabic it is lexicalized.