Passif Grammatical, Passif Periphrastique Et Categorie D'Auxiliaire En Arabe Classique Moderne

What is it about?

Besides the grammatical passive fu‘ila/yuf‘alu, a periphrastic passive can also be encountered in Arabic newspapers: it is a compound of tamma/yatimmu (or ǧarā/yaǧrī) and the maṣdar of the verb, e.g. wa-’akkada ’anna-hu tamma ḥattā l-’ān ’iṭlāq ’alfay mu‘taqal wa-’anna daf‘a ǧadīda sa-tuṭlaq qarīban = "he (i.e. the South Yemeni President) claimed that 2000 prisoners had been released to date and that a new quota would be freed soon". The present paper describes this passive as the result of what the French linguist Émile Benveniste (1902-1976) called an "auxiliation process" and proposes several hypothesis in order to explain its emergence. The most important of these hypothesis is the "graphic hypothesis", which links the occurrence of the periphrastic passive to the Arabic defective script, as it does not allow in many cases to immediately distinguish between active and passive voices of the verb.

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