It was or it was not in the old days, until it was : – A study of time, tense, and aspect in spoken Arabic narrative

Sammanfattning: This study is devoted to Arabic spoken narrative, specifically Syrian Arabic spoken narrative. The focus of this thesis is syntax and narrative. I aim to study how time reference is set in narrative, and what tense and aspect forms are used, as well as some other narrative devices in spoken narratives. In order to study this, the stories are divided according to the narrative layers that Henkin (2010) discusses, since the different layers have their own tense and temporal use. The corpus consists of different stories from different parts of Syria and is collected from Maciej Klimiuk’s (2013) Phonetics and Phonology of Damascus Arabic, and from his (2022) Living in Bab Tuma: Two Texts in Damascene Arabic – in his (ed.) (2022) Semitic Dialects and Dialectology. Fieldwork – Community – Change, as well as from Peter Behnstedt’s (2000) Sprachatlas von Syrien. The dialects represented in the corpus I have chosen are: (mainly) Damascus Arabic, Northern Syrian dialect, Syrian coastal dialect, the dialect of Tayybet al-Imam, and the dialect of the area between mount Hermon and Damascus. The stories are distributed evenly in terms of what type of story it is: there are seven real/contemporary stories and six folktales. I find that aspect plays a big role in spoken narrative Arabic and that the different layers of the stories have different tense and aspect forms. The different narrative layers are also more or less common in the two types of stories.