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The Development of the Universal Perfect in Arabic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Maris Camilleri
Maris Camilleri*
Affiliation:
University of Essex
*
Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex, UK CO4 3SQ, mcamil@essex.ac.uk
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Abstract

Arabic has a construction that expresses a UNIVERSAL PERFECT interpretation. It is here argued that this construction, which is widespread across the different vernaculars, can be analyzed as a possessive perfect construction, a structure thought to be rather rare beyond Indo-European languages spoken in Europe. I further argue that the grammaticalization path differs from that of well-known possessive perfect structures across European languages. I hypothesize that the structure which paved the way for the grammaticalization of a universal perfect construction across Arabic was a possessive structure, originally headed by a preposition, which eventually developed into a transitive verbal predicate taking an interval-denoting object as its possessum, and which subsequently grammaticalized into a construction expressing the universal perfect.

Keywords

universal perfectArabicpossessive perfectgrammaticalization

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 95 , Issue 4 , December 2019, pp. 683 - 710
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 Linguistic Society of America

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