1. Mood in Arabic grammar

The term ‘mood’ in Western grammars of Standard and Classical Arabic applies to the ‘imperfect’ or ‘prefixed’ verbal stem -qtul- and its four endings -u, -a, -Ø (zero), and -an(na). (The full paradigms are given in Table 2, and the prefixes for grammatical person are discussed in Table 1.) The form ya-qtul-u ‘he kills/will kill’ (hyphens separate morphemes) serves as the present/future tense in direct opposition to the pas…