Posture Verbs and Aspect: A View from Vernacular Arabic

This paper discusses a construction found in contemporary Arabic vernaculars (but not in Modern Standard Arabic (henceforth MSA)) which constitutes an instance of a common grammaticalisation path in which a posture verb with a core lexical meaning of ‘sitting’ has grammaticalised into an ASPECTual marker. We bring together data from a range of dialects and provide substantial evidence of grammaticalisation, in which the active participle (ACT.PTCP) of the ‘sit’ verb has developed a range of ASPECTual senses. Here we concentrate on the PROGRESSIVE interpretation, which exists in all of the vernaculars. We argue that there is also evidence for a further grammaticalisation of the posture verb form into a copula. Our aim is to present a comprehensive cross-dialectal picture of the data and consider synchronic and diachronic aspects from an LFG perspective.