The Manifestation of Genericity in the Tense Aspect System of Hebrew Nominal Sentences

This chapter proposes a general account of the semantic interpretation of syntactic structures in Hebrew present tense nominal sentences, and offers an explanation for the descriptive generalization, suggested in (1998), concerning these sentences. In (1998), I showed that, contrary to what had been previously thought, the obligatory vs. optional presence of the pronominal copula in such sentences (called Pron following (1983) terminology, and henceforth) does not correlate with the interpretation of the sentence as identity or predicative, respectively. Instead, I showed that there are predicative sentences where Pron is not optional but rather obligatorily present, or obligatory absent and suggested that this variation correlates with the obligatory interpretation of the sentence as generic and nongeneric, respectively.