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Description:
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This study presents a new analysis of tense, mood and aspect (TMA) categories
in the verb system of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (SIH). The Israeli Hebrew verb
system is generally perceived as a tense-based system, and is so presented
in most of the traditional literature, as well as in a majority of
textbooks. This analysis has been commonly accepted and has seldomly been
criticized. The research underlying this thesis was motivated by the fact
that the traditional analysis of the verb system of Hebrew has to specify a
large number of exceptions, and by the fact that many of the analyzed forms
are inexplicable in terms of the tense-based analysis to Israeli Hebrew
native speakers. It was therefore suspected that the verb system of SIH is
not tense-based, but is rather based on other grammatical properties. The
study is based on a corpus of ongoing spontaneous conversations in Spoken
Israeli Hebrew that were recorded in real-time. It contains authentic
Israeli Hebrew speech as used by native speakers in everyday conversations.
Based on these conversations, an alternative analysis of the SIH verb
system as aspect-based is proposed in this study. This alternative covers
all the exceptions that cannot be explained within the traditional
approach. Further, several additional points are observed in this study
regarding the verb system of SIH: the absence of passive forms from the
verb system, the derivation of imperative forms, the distribution of verbal
patterns, and the presence of many concatenated verb constructions.
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