Tense and text in classical Arabic : a discourse oriented study of the classical Arabic tense system This study undertakes to examine the problem of the tenses in Classical Arabic. While aware of the long tradition which shaped the discussion of this subject and building in fact on some important insights offered by medieval and modern grammarians this study attempts to redefine the discussion and propose a new analysis of the tenses based on a functional text oriented investigation of a large corpus of Classical Arabic prose.This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched