• What Are The Three Main Categories Of Lexical And Grammatical Categories?

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In spite of the universality of the time concept, languages possess different grammatical and lexic al means to encode it. This is plainly evident from the different lexical and grammatical means that languages have and employ to enable senders and receivers from identifying how the event expressed is located in time, a fact that always causes difficulties to L2 learners. Comrie (1985: 8) distinguishes between three major categories used to express time: lexical composite expressions, lexical items and grammatical categories.
Lexical composite expressions involve slotting time specifications into the positions of a syntactic expression such as last month, a year ago, etc. This set is potentially infinite in a language that has linguistic means for measuring time intervals. Lexical items, on the one hand, include adverbials such as now, today, yesterday, etc. Unlike lexical composite and lexical items, grammatical categories involve a set of grammaticalised expressions of location in time. The grammatical expressions of time are temporal notions, which are conveyed by means of two different but interrelated linguistic categories, namely, tense and aspect.
Tense expresses the time of an event in relation to a specific reference …show more content…

Generally speaking, Arabic has been categorized as an aspect variety (Tritton 1943, Bishai 1965, El-Hassan 1987, Holes 1995, among others). Mitchel & El Hasan (1994) clarify that the Arabic verb forms are not concerned with tense differences. Rather, they are primarily concerned with aspectual differences realized or unrealized. Yet, some recent studies argue that categorizing Arabic as an aspectual variety is unjustified as Arabic has tense (Fassi-Fehri 2000). Irrespective of the divergent opinions expressed over tense and aspect in human languages, learners’ interlanguage often has features reflecting the structures of learners’ L1 and rules of

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