There is a general consensus about how difficult it is to come up with a proper description of the system of temporal values in Arabic. Overall, while Arab linguists mostly interpret the system from a temporal angle, western studies have treated it as fully aspectual. Both camps have been inspired by the work of traditional Arab grammarians who clearly stated that the system is not paradigmatically exclusive. This article will describe the system of temporal values in Arabic by following in the footsteps of Matthiessen 1996 in his systemic functional description of tense in English. By locating the system at word rank, instead of group rank, most of the past studies have overlooked a whole range of perspectives such as serial verb constructions and the tactic interdependency potential of the verbal unit in Arabic. Based on Comrie's work on aspect and his assertion that some ‘aspect’ languages can construe different temporal values, I will suggest that it may be time to treat temporal descriptions with more flexibility and instead of dividing languages into two dichotomous groups, place them on a temporal spectrum where at one end there is tense and at the other aspect.

人们普遍认为，要对阿拉伯语的时间价值系统进行适当的描述是多么困难。总体而言，虽然阿拉伯语言学家大多从时间角度解释该系统，但西方研究将其视为完全方面的。这两个阵营都受到传统阿拉伯文法学家工作的启发，他们清楚地表明该系统在范式上并不是排他性的。本文将追随 Matthiessen 1996 年对时态的系统功能描述，来描述阿拉伯语中的时间值系统。用英语讲。通过将系统定位在单词等级而不是组等级，过去的大多数研究都忽略了一系列观点，例如连续动词结构和阿拉伯语中动词单元的策略相互依赖潜力。基于 Comrie 在方面的工作以及他关于某些“方面”语言可以解释不同时间值的断言，我建议可能是时候更灵活地处理时间描述，而不是将语言分成两个二分组，将它们放在一个时间谱，一端是紧张的，另一端是紧张的。