Ka un préfixe temporel en arabe Mardini dérivée du verbe Kana (être)

Grammaticalization is usually thought of as that subset of linguistic changes through which a lexical item in certain uses becomes a grammatical item, or through which a grammatical item becomes more grammatical (Hopper- Traugott, 2). This paper is an attempt to present this phenomenon, showing the results of our investigation on the development of the temporal marker in Mardini Arabic (spoken in Mardin province situated in Southern Turkey) from lexical items (kan-to be) into grammatical prefix (ka). This prefix is attached to the extratem- poral forms of the verb (imperfective and perfective). The verb kana (to be) existent both in standard Arabic and in all the Arabic dialects, has syntactically the role of a temporal marker that changes the tem- poral situation of a normal sentence (without kana). When the verb kana modi- fies a verbal sentence, both kana and the verb that follows it, independently take all the marks of conjugation (aspect, mood, person, gender and number). Hence, we realize that kana is not an auxiliary verb and the Arabic language does not have compound tense forms