A Tenseless System in Search of Tense-oriented Constructions: The Case of Spoken Israeli Hebrew

Abstract

A wide range of literature has dealt with the verb system of Hebrew over the years, yet, most of these are either diachronic descriptions or textbooks which present a more traditional view. The descriptions of Hebrew in the literature comprise of all Hebrew layers. Those which claim to deal with Modern Hebrew suggest that the Hebrew verb system is a tense-based system, which consists of seven verb patterns. The current study was performed on a mini-corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew, which consisted of recorded spontaneous conversations of fifteen Israeli Hebrew speakers in different occasions. The results show some outstanding findings regarding the means, which Israeli speakers use to express tense, mood and aspect (TMA) in Hebrew, and suggest that Israeli Hebrew is an aspect-based system rather than a tense-based one, which consists of only five verb patterns.