It's about time

This study presents a new analysis of tense, mood and aspect (TMA) categories in the verb system of Spoken Israeli. This research was motivated by the fact that the traditional analysis of the Israeli verb system as a tense-based system shows a large number of exceptions, and many of the spoken forms are therefore inexplicable. It was thus suspected that the Israeli verb system is based on other grammatical properties rather than tense. This study is based on a corpus, containing authentic Israeli speech as used by native speakers. Based on these conversations, an alternative analysis of the Israeli verb system as aspect-based is proposed in this book. This alternative covers all the exceptions that cannot be explained within the traditional approach. Furthermore, several additional points are observed in this study regarding the Israeli verb system: 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.