L'EXPRESSION DU FUTUR EN ARABE LITTÉRAIRE ET EN ARABE TUNISIEN
THE EXPRESSION OF THE FUTURE IN LITERARY ARABIC AND TUNISIAN ARABIC

Summary/Abstract: This article is meant to be a contribution to the study of the future in natural languages. It aims to describe the future in literary (classical) Arabic as well as Tunisian Arabic. In fact, one of the characteristics of both literary (standard) and spoken varieties of Arabic is the lack of a prototypical future. Nevertheless they have a host of linguistic tools (markers) which make it possible to express “particular futures” signalling imminence, intention, desire, etc.After presenting the future in literary Arabic through examples borrowed from the quran, we will review the linguistic means in the Tunisian dialect to express this temporal form. Then, focus will be laid on a grammaticalised form which is typical of Tunisian Arabic, namely preverbal particle (prefix) “bāŝ”, phonetic reduction of the active participle “māŝi” which express near future. We will also show that the grammaticalisation process in the spoken varieties of Arabic signals (proves) the existence of linguistic universals that relate to cognitive representations.

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