Notes on the verbal system of Gulf Pidgin Arabic

This is a description of one of the essential constituents of sentence structure in one reduced linguistic system in use in various countries of the western coast of the Arab Gulf and Saudi Arabia, that has been given the name Gulf Pidgin Arabic (GPA) in the very little that has been written about it. The paper starts with locating this reduced linguistic form in its sociolinguistic background. This is followed by a description of the morphological characteristics of the verbs used in this system. The discussion also involves how the grammatical categories that form part of the verbal system are signaled, when and if they are (e.g. tense, aspect, mood, modality, and those that mark agreement like gender, person, and number). Furthermore, the paper deals with the status of the copulative element and predication marker fii and sentence negation in relation to the verbal system. It ends with a discussion of the properties of GPA compared to the general characteristics of world pidgins and to other Arabic-based pidgins and creoles.