Acquisition of temporal expressions in Hebrew

Logic and Cognition
Acquisition of Temporal Expressions
in Modern Hebrew
Project Report
Reut Tsarfaty
rtsarfat@science.uva.nl
March 29, 2004

Preface
This paper is aimed at presenting my conclusive experiment for the “Logic and Cognition”
course (van Lambalgen, 2003) offered by the Philosophy department at the University of
Amsterdam (UvA) as a part of its “Master of Logic” Program in the “Institute for Logic
Language and Computation” (ILLC).
This course is interdisciplinary in nature, and is concerned with philosophical, logical, cognitive
and linguistic aspects of time. The focus this year was on the acquisition of temporal
concepts by children, and in particular the role that planning plays here.
The following report describes in details the design, execution, analysis and results of the
experiment I have conducted on acquisition of temporal expressions by children.
The original experimental outline was twofold:
(1) To obtain information about children’s use of planning in organizing a narrative.
(2) To investigate how children’s use of tenses and aspect is related to the Aktionsart of
verb(phrases) to which the tense is applied.
Being a native Hebrew speaker and interested in its unique features (see section 3 for a
partial survey), I wanted to investigate this with respect to Modern Hebrew. The Hebrew
tense system is fairly limited (3 grammatical tenses and no grammatical aspect) compared
to English, however I assumed that native Hebrew speakers will compensate for the lack of
grammatical aspect by means of other linguistic forms, hence, the next question to be asked
was how?, and this added another dimension to my investigation, namely:
(3) To investigate how Hebrew native speaker compensate for the lack of grammatical aspect
using other linguistic forms.
In addition, there was another non-trivial technical matter for me to tackle, that is to find
native Hebrew speaking children and adults that will agree to cooperate with me in this
experiment. Therefore, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Tamar, Tom and Rona
for helping me to establish the connection with the Jewish/Israeli community, To the KAITS 1
group, who published my “call for children” on their message board and in their news letters,
to Mati, Ori, and Oren for allowing me to speak with their daughters, and last but not least
I would like to thank Boaz, Liat, Yaniv, Gilad, Rachel, Tal and Tal for joining me to this
‘Monkie’ journey.
1 KAITS Kvutsat Israelim Tseirim http://www.kaits.nl/
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Contents
1 Introduction 5
1.1 Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.2 Guiding Themes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.2.1 Events (. . . and Time) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.2.2 Filtering (. . . of events) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.2.3 Packaging (. . . of events) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.2.4 Development (. . . of mature filtering and packaging) . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.3 Plan of The Report . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2 Goals and Procedures 10
2.1 Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.2 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.2.1 Material . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.2.2 Task . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.2.3 Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.2.4 Transcription . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.2.5 Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.2.6 Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
3 Structure and Features of Modern Hebrew 23
3.1 The simple sentence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
3.2 Gender, Number and Agreement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3.3 Tense and Aspect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.4 Morphological patterning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
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3.4.1 Verb inflections (ntiyot) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
3.4.2 Verb conjugations/patterns (binyanim) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
3.5 Embedded clauses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
4 Relating Events in Narratives Using Goal-Plan Structure 35
4.1 Theoretical Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
4.2 Method of Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
4.3 Guiding Assumptions and Predictions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
4.4 Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
4.4.1 HC4.5b . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
4.4.2 HC4.5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
4.4.3 HC7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
4.4.4 HA27 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
4.4.5 HA24 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
4.4.6 HA29 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
4.5 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
5 Using Different Linguistic Forms to Mark Temporal Aspect in Modern
Hebrew 52
5.1 Theoretical Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
5.1.1 Tense, Aspect and Hebrew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
5.1.2 The Aktionsarten . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
5.2 Method of Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
5.3 Guiding Assumptions and Predictions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
5.4 Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
5.4.1 HA27 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
5.4.2 HA24 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
5.4.3 HA29 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
5.4.4 HC7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
5.4.5 HC4.5b . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
5.4.6 HC4.5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
5.5 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
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6 Conclusive Remarks 88
A Transcripts 90
A.1 HC4.5b . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
A.2 HC4.5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
A.3 HC7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
A.4 HA27 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
A.5 HA24 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
A.6 HA29 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
B Book Plot 161
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Chapter 1
Introduction
1.1 Background
This study is aimed at investigating how Hebrew speaking children and adults relate events
in narratives.
The reference point for the narratives is a picture book without words that contains a series of
51 pictures that represent single events, and together form a complete story that is accessible
for children of a wide range of ages. The pictures are the content of a story book, “Monkie”
(Schubert, 1987) and they offer many opportunities to explore the use of language to describe
interaction over time of animated beings in physical settings.
This focus of this investigation is a part of a larger research agenda that is concerned with
the investigation of the relation between language and cognition in the temporal domain.
This research has two corresponding underlying components. On the one hand, they try to
explain how cognitive development determines language development i.e. how newly acquired
cognitive capabilities trigger a search for (and the use of) new ways to express them in spoken,
everyday language, and on the other hand, how language development determines cognitive
development, i.e. how newly acquired linguistic forms 1 trigger a search for opportunities to
use them, and gradually learning how to correctly apply them.
The Temporal domain of this research can be viewed as speaking in, on, and about time.
“Spoken language can be used to talk about the past, and it lives in a rapidly
changing present. But it always faces forward, rushing towards the future that is
. . . charted only a few words or syllables in advance”
This view is presented in details in (Bates, Elman, and Li, 1994), and these forward facing
properties, they claim, have important implications for the ways language is acquired by children,
firstly, the central role of prediction, i.e. what comes next (language in time), secondly,
the temporal constraints on comprehension and production of language in real time (language
1 The term “linguistic forms” refers to the content of any “How to speak language X” handbook, e.g.
(Glinert, October, 1994)
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on time), and thirdly the acquisition of the relevant temporal notions (time words, verb tense
and aspect) to talk about time.
In this investigation I am mainly concerned with the first and the last implications, but
also with the second one, to some extent. All in all, the temporal domain provides us with
a productive arena to study how cognitive development processes and the acquisition of
language intertwine.
(A. and Slobin, 1994) presents a comprehensive cross-linguistic-developmental study of the
relation between language and cognition in the temporal domain. It provides information on
development within and across 5 different languages, in a cross-ages cross-languages arena. I
used this research a source for inspiration in my investigation both on the theoretical front
(guiding themes in section 1.2 and peculiarities of Hebrew in section 3) and for the technical
procedural aspects (chapter 2).
Nevertheless, my goals in this investigation do not coincide with the wide scope of the denoted
ambitious research, and are more limited in the scope of execution and investigation (see 2.1).
The remainder of this chapter will be used to “zoom-in” on my investigation, starting with
defining the guiding themes.
1.2 Guiding Themes
In this section I will pin down the relevant fundamental themes from the wider view I have
presented in the previous section, and later “plug them into play” when forming the theory.
1.2.1 Events (. . . and Time)
This investigation is grounded in a relational theory of time, where events are primary, and
later comes the time line that we seem to experience. However, it is not clear that we
experience time at all, and if so, how we do so (see (van Lambalgen and Hamm, 2004),
chapter 1 for further discussion).
Zacks and Tvestky offered the following definition of event:
“A segment of time at a given location that is conceived by an
observer to have a beginning and an end”
However, as intuitive as this definition sounds, it is not clear that this definition can be
equally applied to hearing a door bell and to World War II, both of which we seem to capture
intuitively as events.
It seems that humans have the ability to parse events at different levels of granularity, what
suggest that events are organized in part-whole hierarchy.
A lot has been said about the individuating events, from the Zacks and Tvestky hypothesis
that events are related to time in the same way that objects are related to space to various
formal axiomatizations of the notion of event (e.g. the Russel-Kamp construction, Walker
construction, etc). Those definition were used to understand and derive the structure of time.
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Our departure point in this investigation is that we do experience time. However, while we
seem to have a ‘direct’ experience of events, our conscious notion of time is a construction.
The ‘building blocks’ of this construction are events themselves, and it seem to have an
hierarchical structure.
Thus, our notion of time is much more complex than the linear relation ‘before then’ between
past and future, and ‘spoken tense’ is much more linguistically demanding.
1.2.2 Filtering (. . . of events)
(A. and Slobin, 1994) defined the theme of filtering as follows
“The world does not present events to be encoded in language.
Rather, experiences are filtered (a) through the choice of perspective
and (b) through the set of options provided by the particular language
— into verbalized events”
The choice of perspective refers to the choice of the events to be recounted, how to arrange
them, and which aspects to highlight/downgrade for rhetorical purposes. In addition the
speaker can choose between various expressive options of the languages in the selection, arrangement
and highlights of particular events.
When examined the narratives, we looked deliberately on these choices and tried to understand
how they are used to talk about time.
1.2.3 Packaging (. . . of events)
(A. and Slobin, 1994) defined the theme of Packaging as follows
“A skillful narrative does not simply consist of a linear chain of
successive events located in time and space. Rather, events must be
packaged into hierarchical construction”
The narrative sequence is a sequence of clauses whose temporal order corresponds to the order
of the narrated events, and these are available already for young aged children. However, it
turns out (A. and Slobin, 1994) that older children and adults use complex syntactic structures
to package events together. This is motivated by the growing understanding of temporal,
causal motivational relations between events, and is also motivating the construction of higher
order events.
This is particularly relevant to the discussion of the use of goal-plan knowledge to structure
narratives (chapter 4).
1.2.4 Development (. . . of mature filtering and packaging)
(A. and Slobin, 1994) defined the theme of Development as follows
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“Younger children take fewer expressive options because (a) cognitively,
they cannot conceive of the full range of encodable perspectives
(b) communicatively, they cannot fully assess the listener’s viewpoint;
and (c) linguistically, they do not command the full range of formal
devices”
Those cognitive, communicative and linguistic certainly appear in the narratives of children
and adults and will focus our attention along the entire investigation.
Now, I am ready to mark the scope and the boundaries of this investigation. In essence, the
aim of the investigation is two-fold:
First, we will focus on planning capacity of children. In this context, planning is a cognitive
precondition for representation of time, and is used to integrate past, present and future. Our
hypothesis is that, once acquired, planning capacity is used to package events, and is evident
in narratives. A more detailed review of this account will follow in section 4.1.
Second, we will focus on children’s use of different linguistic forms (syntactical and lexicalized)
to mark aspect in modern Hebrew, and in particular we will try to relate them to the
Aktionsarten of verb phrases and tenses applied to them.
The latter viewpoint engages us in the study of two more specific notions.
The first is the notion of Aktionsart, a classification of verbs according to their internal
temporal characteristics, i.e. whether they describe states of being, points in time, ongoing
activities, etc. This notion will be treated in greater detail 5 however I will just point out
that it provides a useful means for marking the aspect in the language.
The second is the structure of modern Hebrew. More specifically, we are concerned with
tense and aspect marking in modern Hebrew. More specifically again, we are concerned with
the lack of grammatical aspects in Hebrew and the different means that are available and
are being used to mark aspect in the language. Once we pin down these linguistic forms we
will try to see their development across different ages and to find a relation to the defined
Aktionsart.
To sum up, the two primary research questions I address are as follows:
1. How do children use planning in organizing a narrative?
2. How do Hebrew speaking children use various linguistic forms to mark aspect in the
language, and how are these forms related to the Aktionsarten of verb phrases?
Now, with these two questions in mind, we are ready to discuss the real thing — the experimental
design, execution and results. In the following chapter I will put forth the structure of
the remainder of the document and state clearly where I shall treat each of these components.
1.3 Plan of The Report
As the experiment is two-fold in its nature, I have decided to discuss the two aspects of the
investigation in two different chapters. This allows readers to focus on their area of interest
instead of looking for the relevant bits and pieces in one, wider investigation. However, an
8

exception is the description of the experimental setup and procedures, as this is easily applied
to both.
Hence, the remainder of the document is organized as follows. In chapter 2 I review the
experimental setup, i.e. the goals (2.1) and methods (2.2), and describe how each of the
components (Material, Task etc) is designed to serve the goals.
In chapter 3 I give a brief introduction of Hebrew basic structure and feature that will allow
the reader to make sense of the glosses in the examples and the discussion about the linguistic
forms.
Chapters 4, 5 are dedicated to the the two research questions I have presented above. First I
give a theoretical account of the subject matter, I state the method for analysis and guiding
assumptions, next I analyze each of the narratives in my corpus (4.4), and last I summarize
my findings with respect to the guiding question and conclude
In chapter 6 I summarize and conclude, and put forth my suggestions for further research.
The actual corpus and the plot of the story book are available in the appendixes (1) and (2)
respectively.
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Chapter 2
Goals and Procedures
2.1 Goals
As previously mentioned, this investigation’s main focus is on how Hebrew speaking children
and adults relate events in narratives. The goal of this investigation is two fold:
1. To obtain information about children’s use of planning in organizing a narrative.
2. To obtain information on how Hebrew speaking children use various linguistic forms
to mark aspect in the language, and to investigate how do these forms relate to the
Aktionsart of verb phrases.
To achieve this, we use an experimental setup in which children are presented with a picture
book without words, and are asked to follow the pictures, narrate the story, and answer
various questions. Later I will describe the task in more detail and show how the structure
of the task is tailored to suit the specific investigation goals.
For the time being, it is enough to say that the production of the discourse and answers for
the questions provide us with useful source information for both parts of the study.
First, they allow us to examine the planning capacity of children of different ages through the
way they filter events, package them and organize them in their narrative.
Second, they allow us to look at the linguistic forms that children use to relate events and to
characterize them in their aspectual sense, i.e. in terms of completion and duration.
The interview of children of different ages allows us to investigate the developmental trend of
these two aspects.
The implementation of the first component is as follows, we analyze the hierarchical goal-plan
structure of the “Monkie” story and look for evidence for this hierarchical structure in the
narrated texts.
The implementation of the second component, however, is not as obvious. Hebrew marks verbs
with no more then three basic tenses — past, present and future — and has no grammatical
markers of aspect. Nevertheless, there are other features of the language that can be used
to mark aspect, such as verb inflection (e.g. “binyanim”), syntactic structure (e.g. relative
10

clauses) and lexical items (e.g temporal adverbs). The use of these is, however, voluntary (as
opposed to the obligatory grammatical marking of English verbs — progressive, perfective),
and it isn’t clear hoe exactly these features play a role in marking of aspect, and to what
extent.
In order to understand this better, I added a group of adults to my experimental setup. The
adults were asked to perform the same task as the children, and the data was mainly used
to collect information about “real” marking of aspect, that is, the use of linguistic forms to
mark aspect in the language in a “mature” way.
All in all I have conducted and analyzed 6 interview, 3 adults and 3 children, two of which
are pre-schoolers and one is school aged. When analyzing the results I have conducted first
individual analysis of the interviews, which allowed me to evaluate it with connection to
certain characteristics of the particular interviewee, and consequently I have conducted crossaged
analysis, and tried to identify developmental trends.
I have tried to avoid using quantitative analysis and statistics of any kind, as the sample group
I’m concerned with is very small. However I believe that even this short experiment allowed
me to identify interesting phenomena and to point out interesting consistent “patterns” that
deserve further exploration and investigation.
2.2 Methods
The method used to achieve the goal of this study is analyzing the production of a connected
discourse and answers to questions based on a series of 51 pictures that form a complete story
accessible for children of different ages.
The experiment subjects group included children and adults (50%-50%) of the ages of 4-29.
Both adults and children had been asked to perform the same task (with minor adjustment
for the younger children), and all interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, translated and
analyzed.
The following sections provide a detailed description of each of this methods and how it serves
the achievement of our main goals.
2.2.1 Material
As mentioned before, the departure point for this investigation was the children picture book
without words, named “Monkie” (Schubert, 1987).
The use of the book allows us to control the content of the narrative. In particular, the use
of the picture book is suitable for achieving the goals of the experiment as it allows us to
pre-analyze it in terms of
1. The underlying goal plan hierarchical structure of each of the protagonists.
2. The aspectual characterization of the different events in terms of duration and completion.
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Consequently, this pre-analysis allow us to pin down the parts of the discourse that are
particularly relevant for different dimensions of the analysis.
In addition, the use of the picture book is particularly suitable for the investigation of tense
and aspect markers as
1. Different events posses different aspectual characterizations, which in turn correspond
to various Aktionsarten.
2. The constellation of a series of pictures allows us to fix the reference point on a specific
picture and refer to events that happened before, during, and afterwards. Thus, we
can investigate notions of duration, interruption or completion with respect to specific
points in the time line of the story.
At this point the reader is advised to refer to appendix B to learn about the content of
the storybook as this is the reference point for the rest of our investigation. In subsequent
chapters I have included the pre-analysis of the story and pointed out the relevant events
(pictures) or developments in the course of events that can contribute to the investigation of
the particular subject matter.
2.2.2 Task
The task uses the picture book and is made up of three parts:
1. Ask the interviewee to go through the book and tell the story.
2. Ask the interviewee to look at the final page of the book (which shows the boy reunited
with the monkey) and let them retell the story.
3. Ask the interviewee to answer questions referring to specific pictures.
Component 1: Telling the story
Task description: Ask the interviewee to go through the book and tell the story
Task purpose: This component is used to collect information about goal-plan organization,
but also about use of tenses and marking of aspect.
The use of the information collected in this component:
• For investigating the goal/plan structure:
It turns out (in section 4.1) that the choice to include and highlight certain components
of the story in the narrative (e.g. settings, attempts or resolution) helps to estimate the
planning capacity of the child. Consequently, the analysis of the connected discourse
provided in response to the first component includes a closer examination of these
choices, and how these events were related to one another, to infer the planning capacity
of the child.
• For investigating linguistic forms used to mark aspect:
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Hebrew doesn’t have a narrative present form, and the story can be anchored either in
the present or in the past. Either way, it turns out (in section 3) that time alternation,
adverbial clauses and some verb conjugations are useful means to express notions of
completion and duration, for instance. Hence, we collect information from the discourse
about their use, and see how it is used to mark temporal aspect of events.
Component 2: Retelling the story
Task description: Ask the interviewee to look at the final page of the book (which shows
the boy reunited with the monkey) and retell the story.
Task purpose: This component is used to collect information mainly about hierarchical
organization of goals and plans as the narrator will probably leave out some details. In
addition, it will give us additional information regarding marking of aspect as we fix the
reference point to the last picture.
the use of the information collected in this component: Again, the choice to include
and highlight certain components of the story in the narrative helps to estimate the planning
capacity of the child.
In addition, the description of actions that have been interrupted or are ongoing or completed
in the past helps us to learn some more about linguistic forms that are used to mark aspect
in Hebrew.
Component 3: Answering questions
Task description: Ask the interviewee to answer questions referring to specific pictures.
Task purpose: This component is used to obtain information relating to tense and aspect
and their relation to various Aktionsarten. We fix the reference point on a specific picture
and ask questions that test the linguistic forms that are used to describe events in terms of:
• Complete vs incomplete.
• Ongoing (progressive)
Usefulness of the information collected in this component: Classification of the events
described in the pictures in terms of Aktionsart and identification of the specific linguistic
forms that are to describe those events will gradually help us to map them to one another
and find how aspect markers relate to the Aktionsarten of verb phrases.
Procedures
The same procedures were followed across different age groups. Each subject was interviewed
individually and was given the same instructions with slight variation for younger children
and adults.
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Code Age Gender Born Languages
HC4.5 4.5 F Nl Hebrew Dutch
HC4.5b 4.5 F Ir Hebrew English Dutch
HC7 7 F Ir Hebrew Dutch
HA24 24 F Ir Hebrew (English)
HA27 27 M Ir Hebrew (English)
HA29 29 M Ir Hebrew (English)
Table 2.1: Subjects by Age, Gender and Spoken Languages (second languages are in brackets)
Younger children required some additional effort in order to engage them in the task of storytelling
rather than a picture description mode (e.g. “Imagine that I am the child and you are
the mother, you put me to sleep and you tell me a bed-time story”).
Adults were provided with a slightly different set of instructions in order to engage them in
this “childish” task (e.g. “Imagine that you are telling the story to a child. . . ”), and were also
motivated to cooperate by engaging them in the experimental purpose and ultimate goals,
however this information was provided to them only after completing the three components
of the task to avoid biased answers.
As the experimenter I tried to limit the feedback I gave throughout the interview to be as
minimal and neutral as possible, in order to avoid affecting the expression or form chosen by
the child.
All interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed and translated (including the experimenter
ongoing feedback and comments) and then have been used for further analysis.
2.2.3 Subjects
The group of experimental subjects consisted of 6 interviewees, three adults and three children,
out of which two are pre-schoolers and one is school aged. The adults group included 2 males
and one female and the children group is exclusively girls.
As I have guaranteed anonymity of the participating children and adults I will refer to them
using codes constructed in the following manner: 1
(A)dult/(C)hild + (H)ebrew + (#)age
(e.g. Experiment subject AH27 is a Hebrew speaking adult at the age of 27). Nonetheless,
I will include some background information that is relevant for the study and the evaluation
of the resulting transcripts.
Table 2.1 shows the list of all subjects by age, gender, and spoken languages.
All the adult subjects of the experiment are native Hebrew speakers that have been living in a
Hebrew speaking environment all their lives. Two of the interviewees are currently graduate
1 / separate different options,+ encodes concatenation
14

students that are continuing their study at UvA, and one of them is a graduate student that
works as a software engineer.
With the children the situation is more complicated. The families I have contacted in contact
to participate in the experiment are all Israeli families in the sense that the parents grew up
in Israel and the language spoken at home is Hebrew. Two of the girls were even born in
Israel and spend the first (approximately three) crucial years there.
All of the children are used to hearing bed time stories, audio-recorded stories, and watching
children’s films in Hebrew on a regular basis. The houses I visited played Hebrew background
music by default.
However, we must bear in mind that those children are growing up in a Dutch environment,
and some of them are friends with other international youth. So, these kids are growing up
in a multilingual environment which might have been affected by the use of various other
languages they have command of.
One interesting case is experimental subject number 5 (AC4.5b). The mother of this child is
originally American, and the child speaks Hebrew with her father, English with her mother,
and Dutch with the rest of “outside world”. It is worth mentioning that the girl was born and
grew up in Israel until the age of three. It is also worth mentioning that the language used
to speak between the parents is Hebrew. However, despite the fluent Hebrew demonstrated
in most of the narrative the girl consistently used English words to refer to nouns from the
biological domain (“bird”,“nest”,“tree”. . . ). Interestingly enough, the mother of this girl is
a biological researcher that is mainly concerned with birds, which suggests the (reasonable)
assumption that these terms were introduced to the girl first or exclusively by her mother, in
English.
The reason I devoted some space to reviewing this phenomena is to stress out that these
children are not typical native Hebrew speakers, and the same experiment conducted in Israel
might reveal different results.
However, it is the best that I could get under the circumstances, and despite these drawbacks,
these interviewees still provided interesting and valuable information to investigate.
2.2.4 Transcription
Each interview session was audio-recorded, and then went through a three-step process:
First, I have transcribed the entire session in the Hebrew standard script.
Then, I have re-written the Hebrew transcript in a Latin script.
Last, I have translated the entire transcript to English. (A complete discussion of crucial
translation issues will follow.)
In the first step, I have transcribed the entire session in Hebrew using Hebrew unvocalized
script, 2 which is the standard script for modern written Hebrew.
2 In which most of the vowels are implicit.
15

Code Description Meaning
Default no indication steady intonation
, comma partially falling intonation
. period fully falling intonation
. . . Three dots a short pause
e.g. wondering, rephrasing
empty line a longer pause for some purpose
e.g. thinking, moving between pictures
or moving between pages
! exclamation mark excited delivery
? question mark end of question type utterance
“ ” quote change of voice
e.g. taking a protagonist perspective
Table 2.2: Conventions for transcription of prosodic information
In the transcription I have included all lexical information i.e. the actual utterances, and some
prosodic information, e.g. pauses, gestures, intonation changes, etc. (Please refer to table 2.2
for the standard conventions used to indicate prosodic features of the text.)
However, prosodic information was hardly used in the analysis. The main uses of prosodic
information in the context of analysis were
• Completion of the content (e.g. when the child pointed to a certain figure instead of
literally referring to it).
• Inference from emotional reaction to the extent of taking a protagonist perspective (this
was mainly used to analyze the organization of a text in a goal-plan structure).
In the second step, I have transformed the Hebrew transcript to a format that will be accessible
for English readers. In doing so I have chosen to write Hebrew words in a way that will
correspond directly to the actual phonemic forms. That is, an English speaker should be able
to produce the write pronunciation of any word by simply following the pronunciation of all
vowels/consonants that she is familiar with. I have chosen not to use a more complex transcribing
system 3 as reading this kind of script requires familiarity with the Hebrew alphabet’s
letters, their sounds, the diacritics and their vocalizations, which I assumed potential readers
of this paper do not possess. In doing so I tried to make any reference to Hebrew words as
intuitive and straight forward as possible.
Table 2.3 summarizes the transcription guidelines and standard conventions I used in order
to reflect important matters such as speaker, picture in focus, language. These conventions
were used to allow easy and intuitive reading of the transcribed text and to help with locating
relevant specific information (e.g. reference to specific pictures, answers to experimenter
questions, etc).
3 For example the phonemic script developed by Ornan (1986) for unambiguous writing of Hebrew.
16

Text Description Meaning
text normal subject utterances
text bold experimenter utterances
text Italic subject utterances
in phonemic hebrew
text bold-Italic experimenter utterances
in phonemic hebrew
(text) normal text Meta-task information
in brackets instructions, clarifications, opinions
(text) Italic text Fixing wrong utterances
in brackets or adding missing part of speech
{text} text in Fixing translated utterances
curly brackets by adding missing part of speech in english
{TEXT} uppercase text Fixing translated utterances
in curly brackets by adding exisiting part of speech in hebrew
[text] normal text Free text describing gestures
in square brackets and other para-linguistic features
[[n]] number in double square brackets Focus on picture number n
xxx Three exes unintelligible utterance
Table 2.3: Conventions for the phonemic transcription and translation guidelines
2.2.5 Translation
The last part of the process was translating the entire Hebrew texts to English text. This
part was the most demanding and the least straightforward.
The initial purpose of the translation phase was to make the texts in the corpus accessible
and intelligible for English speakers. Nonetheless, in the context of this work, translation is
a tricky task, because rather then conveying the message of an utterance, it is at least as
important to convey the linguistic forms that were used to communicate this message.
In a sense, this work is also about the expressivity of the language. Thus using, for instance,
the correct grammatical form of the verb in the translations to English (e.g. perfect/progressive
tenses) adds substantial information that was not there in the Hebrew text.
However, interesting features of the Hebrew verbal systems (especially the verb patterns,
“binyanim”, that will be discussed in more detail in 3) are not accessible in English, and
it required some additional information (lexical entries like preposition, verb constructions,
and sometime an entire footnote) to convey the information encoded in the selected linguistic
form.
Therefore, English speakers might find the selected English phrasing uncommon, weird, awkward,
and sometimes even “wrong” in appearance. Nevertheless, I think it is for a good
cause. Reading parts of the translated corpus will give the reader that is not familiar with
the Hebrew language a strong sense of what is really going on there. That is, what does it
“feel” like to use a basic three-tense system, and how one can actually try to compensate for
17

the lack of aspect.
Notwithstanding, while being very strict on the translation of relevant linguistic forms (verbal
forms, relative clauses, etc), I wasn’t as careful about translation of other features in the
language that seem irrelevant to the task at hand. For instance, differences in the word
order between the two languages. This feature seemed not relevant to the task, and therefore
I felt free to leave these kind of distinctions out of the scope of the glossing/translation.
Generally speaking, I was much more strict in translating verb inflections, verb constructions,
connectives, and relative clauses.
The following list contains a survey of the translation guidelines and standard conventions.
Note that the list contains some matters that are crucial for understanding the English texts
in the intended way (and not being mislead by the use of English linguistic forms and standard
construction), however some of it might make sense for the reader who is not familiar with
the structure of modern Hebrew only after referring to the section about features of Hebrew
(section 3).
Note that for easy “Browsing” I have included in the subtitles (+) for the linguistic forms I
have maintained in the translation and (-) for those linguistic forms that I find less relevant
to the study and replaced with the standard English form.
Verb conjugations(+)
Since the Hebrew tense system consists of only three tenses, I had two options:
1. to pick the simple tense form,
2. or to pick the grammatical form in English that is the most similar to the Hebrew in
the sense of its default meaning within a narrative.
I have chosen the latter as I think this eases reading of the text and stresses fundamental
differences between the languages. However it is important to note that this choice is arbitrary
and could be made otherwise.
• Past For most of the Hebrew past inflcetions I used the past simple form, as I think it
corresponds to the default meaning in the sense of an ongoing action.
However, there is still evidence in the translation corpus for a construction that is similar
to past progressive (i.e. the past inflection of the verb to be + the infinitive form of the
verb). However, this is the result of literally translating the form that is referred to as
“Habitual past” and it is used to convey habits 4 .
• Present For most of the verbs in Hebrew I have decided to translate the present inflections
to the present progressive form in English, as I think it corresponds to the default
meaning in Hebrew in the sense of an ongoing action.
Nevertheless, for modal verbs (e.g can, want, may. . . ) and some verbs that describe
phenomena of senses (see, remember, forget) I stuck to the simple present form as I
4 One of the experiment subjects used it quite a lot, as opposed to (A. and Slobin, 1994) which didn’t have
evidence of this use in the entire much bigger corpus
18

think it corresponds to the default meaning in Hebrew in the sense of being in a certain
state.
• Future In order to translate any future conjugation I have consistently used the English
future construction will+verb. Nonetheless, you will still find evidence in the translated
texts for the going to+verb construction. This was used to capture the construction
with the aspectual verb halach-walked which conveys a sense of intention. 5
• The infinitive In translating the infinitive form of the verb in Hebrew, I stuck to the
form to+simple form of the verb that literally corresponds to the construction l+simple
form of the verb in Hebrew.
In addition, note that in more complex constructions I consistently use the infinitive
form of the verb (e.g. start to do) rather then the nominalized construction (e.g. start
doing) as it is closer to the literal meaning in Hebrew.
Verb patterns(+)
As I mentioned before, there is a rich system of verbal forms and pattern that have some
inherent meaning in Hebrew. Without going into further details, I will briefly state the name
of the pattern and English construction I used to convey the message.
• PAAL,PIEL: no further modification
• PUAL,HUFAL: the passive construction using the verb ‘to be’
was+3rd form of the verb
• NIF’AL: the passive construction using the verb ‘to get’
got+3rd form of the verb
• HITPAEL: the intransitive construction for ongoing activities verb+preposition(around,about)
Prepositions(-/+)
• General In general there are significant gaps between the prepositions’ literal meaning
in Hebrew and in English, and a lot of ambiguity, for instance the prefix b can be used
in both English senses of at/on. This distinction was not particularly important to my
analysis so I generally preferred to stick to the correct form in English.
• Verb satellite prepositions Many of the English verbs’ meanings depend to a large
extent on prepositions that encode directions (e.g. go out, come back). The corresponding
Hebrew verbs have these directions inherent in the verb meaning (e.g. exit and
return, respectively). So, anywhere I had a choice between two such equivalent English
verbs I preferred the latter as it is closer to the literal meaning in Hebrew.
5 We will discuss such constructions in chapter 5.
19

Missing parts of speech(-)
• subject Many of the sentences lack a subject as it is encoded in the morphology of the
verb inflection. When translating such an utterance, I have chosen to mark the missing
subject (usually a pronoun) in curly brackets where it is suppose to appear in English.
• the verb ‘to be’ Many of the simple sentences lack an explicit conjugation of the verb
to be (e.g. the construction Noun+Adjective). When translating such an utterance, I
have chosen to mark the missing auxiliary verb (‘to be’) in the simple present form in
curly brackets (where it is supposed to appear in English).
• the indefinite quantifier ‘a’ Hebrew noun phrases do not use the indefinite quantifier
‘a’. When translating such an utterance, I added the missing quantifier ‘a’ in curly
brackets where it is supposed to appear in English.
Gender
Generally speaking, all nouns in Hebrew have an inherent gender. Thus, references to inanimate
objects are done using ‘him/her’ in correspondence to the inherent gender rather than
‘it’, and I have decided to maintain this gender reference.
However there can be found references to the pronoun ‘it’ where the Hebrew narrator used
the determiner ze, which is generally used to refer to an immaterial concept.
Agreement features(-)
Hebrew maintains a long array of agreement features for determiner, gender, and number
between nouns, verbs, adjectives and so forth (e.g. ‘the smart boy’ is translated literally ‘the
boy the smart’ etc). While these features are mainly of interest when discussing the Hebrew
morphology, they are not so relevant to our analysis and I left the indication about these
features out of the scope of the glossing.
Word order(+/-)
Hebrew sentences can accept a relatively free word order comparing to English. Roughly
speaking, I have decided to maintain those changes in word order that are supposed to serve
some purpose, and dropped the ones that are strictly syntactical.
Here are a few examples:
• SVO vs VSO(+) Hebrew sentences can carry both the standard Subject-Verb-Object
(SVO) order or Verb-Subject-Object. Usually constructions that use the latter have a
purpose behind it, for instance to focus on the action rather then the one carrying it
out. Therefore, in these cases I tried to stick to the Hebrew word order rather then the
English standard one.
• Noun phrases(-) In constructing a noun phrase that includes a noun and an adjective
the Hebrew word order would be the opposite of the English one (i.e noun+adjective
20

ather then adjective+noun). This distinction is not meant to serve any purpose and
is strictly grammatical and thus I have chosen to ignore it and stick to the English
standard form to make the sentence more readable.
Still, it is important to note that even after standardizing the translation guidelines there
were still unusual constructions that I have chosen to translate literally to highlight a certain
point, or alternatively there were uses of linguistic forms that were awkward in both languages,
before and after translation. 6 In these cases I have included footnotes, to clarify the issue, to
fill the gap, or to highlight interesting forms.
Last but not least, these transcripts (that are available in appendix A) are raw data. Of
course, there’s a lot more that can be done in order to obtain more information or to support
further analysis. By this I mean glossing the sentences word by word, extracting roots of verbs
and mapping then to a closed set of possible constructions, adding another level of translation
that uses the correct English form and focuses on conveying the same message and so on. In
addition, they are not complete, in a sense that I left out a few Hebrew expressions that do
not have a straight forward translation in English.
However, for the time and the scope of this project I find the current level of processing as
sufficient for my analysis on one hand, and as revealing many important points on the other.
2.2.6 Analysis
The analysis of the texts had two dimensions, each of which consisted of two different focus
points:
• The subject matter:
– The Underlying Goal-plan structure.
– The marking of aspect and relation to Aktionsarten.
• The scope of the analysis:
– Individual analysis.
– Group analysis.
In each of the combinations (2 × 2 = 4 possibilities in total) I evaluated the three parts of
the experiment (telling the story, retelling the story and answering questions) separately, and
gradually evaluated the results of the analysis from each of two perspectives:
• with respect to other parts of the task performed by the same individual,
• and with respect to other individuals performing the same task.
Roughly speaking, I have tried to avoid any sort of statistical analysis per-se, and focussed
on qualitative assumptions, however, I dared to include some numbers when I felt they had
a certain meaning on a small scale or point to a certain pattern.
6 These are mostly relevant to the interviews of the children because, as I’ve mentioned before, they grow
in a multilingual atmosphere and might adopt forms from other languages
21

Nevertheless, I believe that even on this small scale I managed to identify some interesting
points for discussion and point out interesting matters for further research.
22

Chapter 3
Structure and Features of Modern
Hebrew
As previously mentioned, this work is, in a sense, about the expressive power of Modern
Hebrew with respect to tense and aspect. In order to have a common ground for discussion,
I have decided to include a chapter that is concerned with some basic notions of structural
features in modern Hebrew.
The purpose of this chapter is two-fold:
1. To provide the reader with basic means to follow the examples in glosses and to make
sense out of the English literal translation (chapters 4 5).
2. To set the base line for discussion of the linguistic forms that are essentially used to
mark aspect and their relation to Aktionsart (chapters 5 6).
Clearly, this short overview is not aimed at teaching Hebrew nor at replacing a reference
book for Hebrew grammar (see (Glinert, October, 1994)). Rather, it is meant to introduce
crucial notions in Hebrew morphology, syntax, and morphosyntax that will come into play in
subsequent chapters.
The overview is organized in ‘chunks’, each chunk concerned with a particular aspect in the
Hebrew morphology or syntax, and each containing entries with definition, description, and
meaning (to some extent) of the relevant notions. It does not require any previous knowledge,
linguistic or otherwise, of the Hebrew language, and in particular does not assume familiarity
with the Hebrew script. All example are given with a strictly phonemic gloss with full
translation to English.
Roughly speaking, this overview is meant to provide an initial reference point for glossing of
terms I use in my examples and the more involved analysis, however the interested reader
is invited to look at the cited sources for further exploration of subjects he or she finds
particularly interesting or relevant to his/her understanding of the subject.
23

3.1 The simple sentence
Sentence structure
Modern Hebrew has a canonical SVO order, favored by many language (e.g. English). That
is, in the basic modern Hebrew sentence, the subject comes before its predicate.
E.g.
Examples:
Subject+Verb
Subject+Adjective
Subject+Adverb
Monkie nafal Monkie fell
Monkie ayef Monkie’s tired
Monkie sham Monkie’s there
Word order
Hebrew allows departure from the SVO order, which can be caused by several constructions
in different contexts.
For example, sentences that begin with an adverb (or an adverbial clause) often put the verb
ahead of the subject, to make the sentence more balanced.
E.g.
Example:
Adverb+Verb+Subject
pit’om nafal hakof Suddenly fell the monkey
This also happens inside adverbial and relative clauses after the conjunction ‘she’ that corresponds
to the English word ‘that’.
Example:
acharey shenafal hakof after {that} the monkey fell
As in English, a direct quotation can be follow by inversion.
Example:
“oy lo”, amar hayeled “Oh no”, said the boy
In addition, Hebrew tends to use word order to mark the focus of the sentence (where English
might use a passive voice, for example). Thus, to focus a certain noun (in addition or in
contrast to other nouns in the wider context) Hebrew likes to have it first in a sentence.
E.g.
24

Example:
Object+Subject+Verb
et ha’ayin hashniya hu lo mashach The second eye he didn’t pull.
(implying, as opposed to the first eye)
This construction is particularly effective in narratives and story telling.
Definite and indefinite article
The definite article ‘The’ is usually ‘ha’ in Hebrew, and it is always prefixed to the noun.
Example:
haima lakcha oto The-mother took him
Hebrew has no word for ‘a’ and a rough substitution for ‘some’.
Example:
hu ra’a dag he saw a fish
hu ra’a kama kipodim he saw some hedgehogs
The verb ‘to be’
In general, simple sentence in Hebrew omit the verb ‘to be’.
Examples:
Monkie nofel Monkie (is) falling
Monkie ayef Monkie (is) tired
Monkie sham Monkie (is) there
However, it allows construction with the “particles of being” hi, hu, hem, hen that denote
‘he’,‘she’,‘they (m)’, and ‘they (f)’ respectively when constructing a longer subject, e.g. using
the determiner haze, ‘this’.
Example:
hakipod haze hu chamud This hedgehog is cute
The verb ‘to have’
For ‘there is’, ‘there are’ (i.e. ‘there exist’) Hebrew uses the verbal particle yesh.
Example:
yesh be‘aya There is a problem
25

For ‘have’, Hebrew makes use of the verb yesh.
E.g.
l+X+yesh+Y
literally: To X there is Y
Meaning: X has Y
For Personal Pronouns (‘I’, ‘you’) Hebrew uses the corresponding prepositions li, lech etc,
that usually come after yesh.
E.g.
yesh li kof
literally: there is to me {a} monkey
Meaning: I have a monkey
For ‘don’t have’, Hebrew uses eyn
E.g.
eyn li kof
literally: there is no to me {a} monkey
Meaning: I don’t have a monkey
3.2 Gender, Number and Agreement
Gender
Every noun in Hebrew is either masculine or feminine. Whereas nouns denoting a male or
a female are masculine or feminine respectively, nouns denoting objects are masculine or
feminine without any apparent reason.
Examples:
Masculine: aba ‘father’, bayit ‘(a) house’, ets ‘(a) tree’
Feminie: ima ‘mother’, sira ‘(a) boat’, mizchelet ‘(a) sled’
Gender affects the form of nouns, adjectives, verb inflections, numeral quantifiers and almost
anything related to the noun.
Examples:
yeled matok (A) sweet(m) kid(m)
yalda metuka (A) sweet(f) kid(f)
hayeled halach The kid(m) walked(m)
hayalda halcha The kid(f) walked(f)
26

Number
Number, i.e. singular, plural, or any numeral quantifier, affects the form of all nouns, adjectives,
and verb inflections, and several prepositions.
It is worth mentioning that the plural form is also affected by the gender of the noun in the
construction.
Examples:
yeladim tovim good(m) kids(m)
yaldot tovot good(f) kids(f)
shlosha yeledim holchim Three kids(m) {are} walking(m)
shalosh hayeladot holchot Three kid(f) {are)} walking
Agreement
In Hebrew there is a large array of agreement rules between words in the sentence.
Roughly speaking:
Every adjective must ‘agree’ (i.e. have the same linguistic forms) with the noun it is related
to on (1)gender (2)feature (3)determiner,
Every adjective must ‘agree’ (i.e. have the same linguistic forms) with the noun it is related
to on (1)gender (2)feature, and every
hayeladim hatse’irim holchim lapark The young(m) the kids(m) (are) walking(m)
to the park
hayeladot hatse’irot holchot lapark The young(m) the kids(m) (are) walking(m)
to the park
3.3 Tense and Aspect
A three-way tense system
* Biblical Hebrew did not manifest a category corresponding to the notion of ‘tense’ in modern
European languages. Instead, the biblical language made a distinction between perfective and
imperfective aspect (see (Berman, 1978) p. 139). A major change was wrought in mishnaic
times with the advent of a three-way tense system, that corresponds to past, present and
future. This system is manifested in Modern Hebrew and it uses the biblical perfective to
denote ‘Past’, the biblical imperfective to denote ‘Future’, and a benony form to express
an intermediate domain which is neither past nor future, and can be roughly referred to as
‘Present’.
It should be clear that the linguistic forms used to express the three tenses incorporate the
various aspectual notions such as (from an English point of view) simple, progressive, and
perfect.
27

The following sections contain concrete examples that demonstrate these phenomena.
Past
The meaning of the Hebrew past tense essentially covers four English past tenses.
Thus, the phrase ani kamti correspond to exactly four English sentences:
I got up
I have got up
I was getting up
I had got up
Present (The Benoni form)
As noted before, the ‘Present tense’ refers to what known at the benoni form of the verb and
express an intermediate level that is neither Past nor Future. 1
Effectively, it covers the two English tenses ‘Present simple’ and ‘Present Progressive’.
Thus, the phrase ani kama correspond to exactly two English sentences:
Future
I get up
I am getting up
The Future Tense has two main uses: (1) prediction (2) a request (when used in a 2nd form).
Examples
ani akum besheva I will get up at seven
Takum besheva Get up at seven
It covers the following three future forms, and thus the phrase ani a’avod correspond to the
following English phrases
I will work
I would work
I will be working
The Compound Past Tense
One way of expressing a habit of doing something (the English ‘used to’) is to add the past
tense of the verb ‘to be’ to the present tense of the verb at hand.
1 The benoni form has certain morphological and syntactic properties that are essentially different from the
corresponding one in the Past and Future tenses, however we will not discuss it here as it is out of the scope
of this document. For further elaboration of this topic refer to (Berman, 1978) chapter 3.
28

This construction is known as the Compound Past tense, or the Habitual Past tense, and has
two main uses: (1) To express ‘old’ habits, things one ‘used to do’ in the past (2) To express
unreal conditions, counterfactuals.
(1)
(2)
kol boker hayiti kama besheva
Literally: Every day I was getting up at seven
Meaning: Every day I used to get up at seven
im hayita holech, hayiti holechet
Literally: If you were going, I was going
Meaning: If you went I would go
3.4 Morphological patterning
In Semitic languages, the vast majority of content words (verbs, nouns, adjectives), can
be characterized in terms of a combination of a Consonantal root+Morphological pattern.
Roughly speaking, the pattern (including vowels, prefix, and/or suffix) provides a template
into which the root consonant letters can be plugged to get the required meaning.
In the following section I will explore what roles this root-base relation plays in verbal forms. 2
See (Berman, 1978) for a comprehensive survey of verb, noun and adjective patterns.
3.4.1 Verb inflections (ntiyot)
The term inflections refers to forms, or more precisely, affixes, that are used to mark grammatical
categories such as person, number, gender and tense. Hebrew displays a rich array of
such inflectional affixes.
Finite verb forms are distinguished in terms of tense, and they also display number, gender
and person. 3
Table 3.1 below demonstrates how we use the root g.m.r and the inflectional affix to get all the
possible conjugations of the verb lgmwr ‘to finish’. Note that these inflections are productive
in the sense that they apply across the lexicon of all members of the ‘verb’ category. 4
In the remainder of the section I will review two additional useful verb patterns, namely the
infinitive and the imperative.
2 I will leave out the discussion of noun and adjective patterning as it is not relevant to this work.
3 With the exception of present tense which is not marked with Person.
4 With slight variation for different verb patterns, see next section.
29

The imperative
Person/Gender/number Past Present Future
1st/m/s gamarti egmor
2nd/m/s gamarta gomer tigmor
3rd/m/s gamar yigmor
1st/f/s gamarti egmor
2nd/f/s gamart gomeret tgmeri
3nd/f/s gamra tigmor
1st/m/p gamarni nigmor
2nd/m/p gamartem gomrim tgmeru
3nd/m/p gamru ygmeru
1st/f/p gamarnu nigmor
2nd/f/p gamarten gomrot tigmorna
3nd/f/p gamaru tigmorna
Table 3.1: Inflection of the root g.m.r for tenses, gender and number
The imperative is a form of positive request that is more formal in tone, occurring in documents,
manuals, cookbooks, speech and the like. Some imperatives, (e.g. ‘wait’, ‘come’)
however are widely used in everyday spoken language.
The imperative form has only three inflections, towards a male, a female and many males/females.
Thus the imperative ‘get up!’ in English corresponds to the following three imperatives in
Hebrew
kum! to a male
kumi! to a female
kumu! to many
The infinitive
The infinitive form of the verb, also known as the ‘verbal noun’ shem po’al in traditional
grammar, cannot be inflected. It is a compound of the prefix le and one consistent inflection
of the verb at hand, and corresponds to the English construction To+Verb.
Consequently, the infinitive is used to cover many uses of the this construction.
Example:
ani rotse lalechet I want to go
See section 3.5 for further exploration of possible constructions.
It can also be used to instruct someone ‘to do’ something.
30

kulam lalechet! everybody, go!
3.4.2 Verb conjugations/patterns (binyanim)
In this section we will briefly review what appears to be the most interesting and difficult
part of the arena of Hebrew morphological patterning.
The term binyanim, (literally, ‘building’ or ‘constructions’) refers to a set of traditional
‘templates’, or more formally ‘conjugations’. Any inflected verb-form of the language (as
the one apparent in table 3.1) can be specifically characterized based on a combination of
Root+Binyan. Specifically, all the verb inflections in the table can be characterized by the
root g.m.r and binyan Pa’al.
All verbs, without exception, must adhere to one of the seven verb patterns, binyanim, denoted
below. These patterns are basically grammatical rather then semantic, i.e. the pattern a root
is put through does not guarantee anything about its meaning.
For example, putting the root k.b.l through different patterns will give us the following verbs:
PA’AL kaval complain
HIF’IL hikbil parallel
PI’EL kibel receive
The respective meanings seem rather arbitrary, and there is hardly a magic formula to predict
the verb meaning out of the characterizing root and binyan.
However, the sets of verbs that the same binyan yields sometimes have common characteristics,
and they tend to relate in meaning in some extent.
In the following sections I will review some of the characteristics of the seven binyanim. 5
The pattern PA’AL (pel)
PA’AL is the simplest, most common binyan, also referred to as binyan kal. The literal
meaning of kal is ‘light’ and it received this name as it has no additional affixes other then
the root consonants. This binyan is often used to describe one’s actions and activities, but
can also describe things that ‘happened to’ one.
E.g.
halach walked
amar talked
nafal fell
5 Some of these characteristics will play a role in our further investigation of aspect markers in the language.
31

The pattern HIF’IL (hpeil)
The pattern HIF’IL is often used to denote ‘cause something to happen’, when this ‘something’
often corresponds to the same root in binyan PA’AL.
E.g.
PA’AL/HIF’IL lavash/hilbish put on a cloth/dressed someone else
nafal/hipil fell/dropped, made someone or something fall
The pattern PI’EL (pel)
Binyan PIEL, also referred to as a ‘heavy’ conjugation, is often used for transitive verbs, i.e.
to denote ‘doing something to/with somebody/something’
E.g.
shiker lie
bishel cook
biker visit
The pattern HITPAEL (htpel)
Binyan HITPAEL is the so-called ‘middle-voice counterpart’ of binyan PIEL. For PIEL verbs
denoting ‘doing something to someone’, binyan HITPA’EL is the intransitive counterpart
denoting ‘happening to itself’.
E.g.
hamarak hitbashel the soup cooked
The pattern NIF’AL (npel)
Binyan NIFAL is often the passive voice of binyan PAAL.
E.g.
PA’AL/NIF’AL
ganav/nignav steal/be stolen
Moreover, it can also serve to denote a change of state.
E.g.
PA’AL/NIF’AL
shavar/nishbar break/got broken (. . . by someone)
achal/ne’echal ate/got eaten (. . . by someone)
32

The pattern PU’AL (pel)
Binyan PUAL is the passive voice of binyan PIEL.
E.g.
PIEL/PUAL
chilek/chulak hand out/be handed out
shilem/sulam pay/be payed
The pattern HUF’AL (hpel)
Binyan PUAL is the passive voice of binyan HIF’IL.
E.g.
PAAL/HIF’IL/HUF’AL
gadal/higdil/hudgal grew/expanded/was expanded
nafal/hipil/hupal fell/made fall/was caused to fall
3.5 Embedded clauses
Many Hebrew verbs take an infinitive, just like English verb constructions.
E.g.
AUXILIARY VERB + TO + MAIN VERB
The list below reviews common uses of this construction.
Ani rotsa lashir I want to sing
Ani ohevet lirkod I love to dance
hatinok menase lalechet The baby tries to walk
Hu mitkeven la’azov He intends to leave
Hshemesm matchila lishko’a The sun starts to fall
Note also that modal verbs take the infinitive form (as opposed to English where they do not
accept the preposition ‘to’)
Ata yachol lehisha’er You can {TO-}stay
Reported thoughts
To lead into reported statements, beliefs, feelings, etc, one generally inserts she (which is
equivalent to ‘that’ in enslish)
Hu amar shehu ayef He said that he (is) tired
33

Relative clauses
Adverbial clauses, clauses expressing time, cause, purpose, etc require the insertion of the
same conjugation she.
Acharey shehakof nafal hayeled bacha after THAT the monkey fell the kid cried
Eifo shehakof nafal hyu achbarim where THAT the monkey fell there were mice
34

Chapter 4
Relating Events in Narratives Using
Goal-Plan Structure
4.1 Theoretical Discussion
In our first theme ‘events and time’ (1.2.1) we have suggested that our experience of time is a
construction rather then a direct experience. Moreover, we have suggested that the underlying
structure of what we experience is seemingly based on part-whole relations rather then linear
(before/after) relations.
Our hypothesis is that causality and planning provide the medium through which we construct
our conscious experience of time, in the sense that it allows us to glue the past to the present
and to the future.
A Plan requires that an agent desires to obtain some goal and believes that a series of
action can be carried out to achieve that desire. Goals and Purposes are desired states that
potentially exist in the future, whereas actions and activities, once initiated, exist in the past
and become states of being. These states, in turn, are causally prior to our next action.
The claim that Planning is central to our constructed experience of time seem plausible from
several aspects:
Firstly, goals and plans seem to play an important role in individuating events, as suggested
by Zack and Travesky: “In general it seems that as the time scale increases events become
less physically characterized and more defined by the goals, plan intentions and traits of their
participants.”
Secondly, whole-part hierarchical relations between events seem to match goal-plan hierarchies,
where a plan to achieve a goal is usually compounded of subordinate goals, which in
turn have plans to achieve them, and so forth.
Lastly, there is some evidence to suggest that our cognitive representation of the future is
bound to the fact that humans are goal-oriented as opposed to being governed by large sets
of condition-action rules. The realization of a goal is necessarily grounded in the future.
Trabasso and Stein (T. and L., 1994) suggest that
35

“The plan unites the past (the desire state) with the present (an attempt) and
the future (the attainment of the that state).”
In the following chapter we will try to find evidence for the use of planning knowledge for the
interpretation and production of the story depicted by the sequence of pictures in the story
book.
4.2 Method of Analysis
In this experiment, we investigate whether children (and adults) of different ages make use
of planning in order to narrate the “Monkie” story. Upon establishing this we can plausibly
argue that planning provides the means by which we construct our conscious notion of time.
Plans have an episodic structure that unfolds over time. They anticipate, guide, interpret,
and evaluate actions and outcomes. A general model for depicting this structure uses five
categories of information that can be related by causal, temporal or logical relations:
(S) Settings - The space, time and circumstances and participants.
(E) Events - Changes in state of the protagonist that are significant to the one who experiences
them
(IR) Internal Responses - Forms of perception, cognition, thoughts, wishes and emotions
(G) Goals - Desired future states, objects or activities
(A) Attempts - To achieve subordinate goals motivated by the goal
(O) Outcomes - That index success or failure in achieving a goal.
In the narration of the story, Settings (S) provide important context and background information
and appear early on the narration. Events (E) are often problems that arise and
create needs, lacks or wants. This generally leads to an Internal Response (IR), that in turn
motivates the establishment of a goal (G). Once inferred, a plan to achieve that goal may be
accessed as a set of beliefs about other goals and actions that can be carried out to achieve
them. Plans may be constructed in advance or opportunistically. The plan and the derived
subordinate goals motivate Attempts (A) to achieve that goals, and the Outcome (O) caused
by them is like an event in the sense that it can cause or enable more attempts, reactions, or
goals.
The description of the story in terms of relations between these categories of information
is called a causal network representation and it clearly outlines its underlying goal driven
hierarchical structure.
I claim that the story depicted by the pictures of “Monkie” provides the narrator with several
opportunities to describe the actions of a protagonist in terms of hierarchical structure.
To demonstrate this, I have chosen three of the main protagonists and presented their causal
network. Figures 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3 show the causal networks of the boy, the bird, and the toy
doctor. Tables 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3 unfold the planning components that are involved in their
causal network.
36

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# Code Picture Description
1 S [[1]] Introduction of the participants
establish pet-owner relation
set location in the park
2 E [[6]] boy looses monkey
3 IR [[8]] boy is sad
4 G1 Have monkey back
5 G2 Find monkey
6 G3 Search at home
7 A [[7]] Search under the chair
8 O(-) Not found under the chair
9 G2 Find monkey
10 G3 Search in the park
11 A [[9]] Go to the park and look for monkey
12 O(-) Not found in the park
13 O(-) Abandon the search
14 O(-) Abandon the goal to get monkey back
15 E [[47]] Boy sees monkey at the display window
16 IR [[48]] Boy is excited
17 G1 Have monkey back
18 G2 Get Monkey from the toy doctor
19 A [[50]] Enter the store and
ask for it from the toy doctor
20 O(+) Boy gets monkey from the doctor
21 O(+) [[51]] Boy have monkey
Table 4.1: Planning components in the boy’s causal network
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Figure 4.1: The causal network of planning components - The boy’s perspective
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Figure 4.2: The causal network of planning components - The bird’s perspective
37
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# Code Picture Description
1 S [[28]] set location in the park
[[31]] Nest full of objects
2 E [[28]] Bird encounter a chain of animals
Bird sees monkey
3 IR [[8]] Bird is excited
4 G1 Add Monkey’s eyes to the collection
5 G2 Have Monkey
6 G3 Take monkey from the hedgehogs
7 A [[29]] Scare away hedgehogs
8 O(+) catch monkey
9 O(+) [[30]] Have monkey
10 G1 Add Monkey’s eyes to the collection
11 G2 Have monkey eyes
12 G3 Have monkey’s right eye
13 A [[30]] Pull monkey’s right eye
14 O(-) Interrupted by his falling off the tree
15 O(-) Abandon the goal to get monkeys eyes
Table 4.2: Planning components in the birds’s causal network
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Figure 4.3: The causal network of planning components - The toy-doctor’s perspective
38
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# Code Picture Description
1 S [[35]] Set location by a lake
[[36]] Someone is fishing
2 E [[37]] Monkey caught
3 IR [[38]] Fisherman is intrigued
4 G1 Have monkey
5 G2 Fix Monkey
6 G3 Take monkey home
7 A [[39]] Go home with monkey
8 O(+) [[40]] At home with monkey
9 G2 Fix monkey
10 G3 Fix monkey’s eye+tail
11 A [[41]] Sewing eye and tail
12 O(+) Fixed eye and tail
13 G2 Fix monkey
14 G3 clean monkey
15 A [[42]] wash monkey
16 O(+) Monkey is clean
17 G2 Fix monkey
18 G3 Dry monkey
19 A [[43]] Dry monkey
20 O(+) Monkey is dry
21 O(+) Monkey is fixed
22 O(+) Monkey is in the doctor’s window
Table 4.3: Planning components in the toy-doctor’s causal network
39

It is important to note that such a network could be inferred for other protagonists (mice,
hedgehogs, etc.) however I have chosen to focus on those three characters as they are clearly
the most significant for the story, both in the qualitative sense, in their way they drive the
story forward, and in the quantitative sense of number of pictures dedicated to them.
It seems that the goal/plan structure of the boy is the most important one, as its setting
opens the story, the ‘lost’ events motivates every other activity of any protagonist along the
line of the story (if it hadn’t happened, none of this would occur), and its resolution ends the
story.
Note that causal relations also exist between the protagonists networks, e.g. the resolution of
the plan of the doctor leads to the boy’s reunion with the monkey. So these causal networks
can be view as nested, and their composition also yields some sort of hierarchical structure.
In the following chapter I will analyze the text in the corpus to find evidence for the denoted
planning components (using lexical forms such as modal verbs, markers of purposes, states of
being, etc).
In order to verify whether the narrative produced follows a goal plan structure I adopt Scholnik
and Friedman’s planning components analysis method ((A. and Slobin, 1994) p. 99) in which
for a narrator to encode a temporal sequence of events as a coherent narrative organized
around a goal plan structure the narration should include the following content:
1. The protagonist has a relation to an object,
2. The protagonist undergoes a change of state related to that object,
3. The change of state initiates a goal plan,
4. The protagonist carries out actions relevant to the goal,
5. The protagonist alters the goal in case of a failure,
6. Attempts finally result in success (resolution).
4.3 Guiding Assumptions and Predictions
1. The causal networks of the different protagonist are not of the same importance. The
causal network of the boy seem to be the most important one, whereas the other networks
are subordinate to this one. Hence, in my analysis I use the reference to the boys
causal network as the main evidence for use (or lack of use) of goal/plan knowledge,
and I refer to the components of the other to see if they provide further evidence for
my analysis result.
2. The subjects of this experiment were asked to tell the story twice; once upon interpretation
of the pictures and one while the reference point was fixed to the last picture. I
do expect that some of the content will be left out. However, again, I expect that the
information that will be left out will be related to those subordinate plans, or a plan
that does not come to resolution.
40

Type Component First Second
Narrative Narrative
Settings: Introduce monkey - -
Possession - -
Location in the park + +
Initiating events: Storm - -
Going home + +
Monkey falls + +
Boy arrives home + -
Monkey gone + -
Internal response: Boy sad + -
Goals: [Have monkey] - -
[Find monkey] + -
Attempts(purpose): Search at the park +(-) -
Outcome(resolution): Failure - -
Table 4.4: HC4.5b:Inclusion of planning components: First Episode
3. Some of the picture sequences (mice, hedgehogs) are much harder to infer an underlying
goal plan structure for, hence I do not expect inclusion of consistent planning component
in the narrative, but mostly personal spontaneous interpretation.
4. I do expect that for those protagonist that have a clear causal network it will be easier
to ‘pack’ the information in connection to the rest of the story and they will be more
likely to appear in the second round then the ones that don’t.
5. I do expect that for those protagonists whose causal network is a closer subordinate to
the one of the main protagonist that they will be more likely to appear in the second
round then the ones that whose aren’t.
6. I expect to find more evidence for underlying goal plan structure as the age increases.
4.4 Analysis
4.4.1 HC4.5b
Tables 4.4 and 4.5 show a summary report of the inclusion of planning components of the
two central episodes in the goal/plan structure of the boy’s perspective.
We can see that the girl only partially includes planning components in her narrative. She
leaves out in both of the narrations the crucial parts of the setting, namely, the introduction
of the characters and the establishment of the pet-owner relationship. She includes an explicit
remark about the disappearance of the monkey only in the first narrative, and likewise the
boys internal responses and the attempt to look for the monkey in the park are missing in
the second part.
41

Type Component First Second
Narrative Narrative
Settings: Toy store + -
Fixed monkey + +
Initiating events: Boy comes around + +
Boy sees monkey - -
Internal response: Boy excited - -
Goals: [Have monkey] - +
[Get monkey back] - +
Attempts(purpose): Enter the store +(-) -
Ask the doctor -(-) -
Outcome(resolution): Success + +
Table 4.5: HC4.5b: Inclusion of planning components: Last Episode
In the last episode she includes partial settings and one initiating event (namely that the boy
comes around), however she clearly refers back to the original high level goal “veacharey ze
hu ratsa et ze” “And after that he wanted it”, and the resolution of the plot “veacharey ze
haya lo” “And after he had it”.
This can indeed point out the beginning of the use of a goal/plan knowledge to interpret
the story, however there is even clearer evidence if we read her narrative with respect to
the monkey’s perspective. Although the monkey seem to be quite passive, the girl seems to
include lots of information from all available categories in the first narrative, and to ‘pack’
the information in higher level events in the second narrative.
In the first narrative she starts by locating the monkey in the park and pointing out that he is
in some sort of a danger “hem halchu lepo. . . vehu rotse le’echol oto” “They went here. . . and
now he wants to eat him”. Then she points out the crucial event of falling off the bicycle,
and includes a lot of Internal Reactions of the monkey for changes of states caused by the
other protagonists, e.g. “acharey ze hem rotsim shehu yitse. . . et ze hu lo ohev” “After that
they want him to go out. . . this he doesn’t love” with respect to the mice and “achshav hu
holech lishin itam. . . et ze hu ohev” “Now he goes to sleep with them. . . this he loves” with
respect to the hedgehogs. Finally, she puts the plot resolution in a phrase where the boy is
quite passive, namely “hu mekabel oto” “He receives it” with no markers about preceding
attempts, internal response, or the high level goals.
In the second narrative, she repeats the crucial setting and initiating events for the monkey,
namely being in the park, being in danger of being eaten, and falling off the bicycle, and then
fold all other episodes into the following phrase:
“ve’acharey ze. . . mishehu yikach oto” “And after that. . . someone will take him”
“ve’acharey ze od mishehu yikach oto” “And after that another one will take him”
“ve’acharey ze od mishehu yikach oto” “And after that another one will take him”
“ve’acharey ze od mishehu yikach oto” “And after that another one will take him”
“ve’acharey ze hafish. . . ” “And then the fish. . . ”
It is important to note, first, that the references correspond precisely to the protagonists she
42

Type Component First Second
Narrative Narrative
Settings: Introduce monkey +
Possession + +
Location in the park + +
Initiating events: Storm -
Going home -
Monkey falls -
Boy arrives home -
Monkey gone -
Internal response: Boy sad -
Goals: [Have monkey] -
[Find monkey] -
Attempts(purpose): Search at the park -
Outcome(resolution): Failure -
Table 4.6: HC4.5:Inclusion of planning components: First Episode
mentioned in the first narration (namely the mice, hedgehogs, bird, bees and fish), and second,
the use of the future tense here which we have already mentioned is intimately connected with
the notions of goal yet to be achieved. Again, she resolves the plot by mentioning that the
boy has the monkey.
To summarize, it seems that the girl is starting to use goal/plan knowledge to interpret the
pictures in the first narrative and in packing the information in the second one, and this is
mostly evident by viewing the plot from the monkey’s perspective, where he is introduced
and located, goes through undesirable state changes, and has to go through several survival
attempts in order to be reunited with the boy.
4.4.2 HC4.5
The analysis of the text of subject HC4.5 requires a slightly different treatment. This girl’s
first sentence was
“Ah, ani yoda’at al ma ze” “Oh, I know what it is about”
“ze al yeled echad she’ibed et hakof shelo” “It is about a kid that lost his monkey.”
Then she presented the story in short, packed phrases and refused to retell it. Tables 4.6 and
4.7 show a report of the planning components she included in her condensed narrative.
Clearly, she includes the crucial information about settings (the possession is marked by
assigning a nickname to the monkey, implying there is a meaningful relationship there), the
crucial initiating event (monkey is lost), and the plot resolution (getting it back). However,
the rest of the information seemed quite random, and was driven by her focusing randomly
on pictures that ‘caught her eye’.
43

Type Component First Second
Narrative Narrative
Settings: Toy store +
Fixed monkey +
Initiating events: Boy comes around +
Boy sees monkey +
Internal response: Boy excited -
Goals: [Have monkey] -
[Get monkey back] -
Attempts(purpose): Enter the store +
Ask the doctor +
Outcome(resolution): Success +
Table 4.7: HC4.5: Inclusion of planning components: Last Episode
In sum, it seems to me that the important bits of the story were retrieved from her memory
rather than interpreted online, and in that case, the inclusion of those crucial components
from her memory make plausible the argument that she did use some goal/plan knowledge
to ‘pack and store’ it when she heard it in the past.
4.4.3 HC7
This subject is the only school age child I have interviewed in this experiment. As such, I
expected her to present a coherent story in both rounds, and to show clear evidence for the
use of goal/plan knowledge in ‘filtering’ and ‘packing’ the events in her narratives.
Tables 4.8 and 4.9 report the planning components she included in both of her narratives.
Clearly, she includes most of the planning components in the first narrative, however she does
not mark attempts with clear purpose, nor mark explicitly the higher level goals (e.g. she
does not tend to use modal verbs like ‘want’).
In the second narrative she includes only partial information about the first episode. She
presents the information about the setting and the crucial initiating events, however does not
mention the goal and consequent attempts at failure. Once the boy is presented again, she
starts to include the relevant components again, and clearly marks the resolution of the plot.
So, as expected, the girl did demonstrate a more mature filtering and packing of the events
by producing a coherent story in both narratives. The lack of inclusion of several important
planning components can be explained however in two different ways. One is that she is less
to likely ‘pack’ in memory failed attempts as they do not contribute to driving the main story
forward, and thus, they are less likely to be retrieved when the story is retold. The second
is that this girl’s narrative should be evaluated from the monkey’s perspective (as was done
with HC4.5b) from which events in the causal network of the boy are less relevant, and what
is more relevant is the setting, the various “survival attempts” and changes of states that the
monkey goes through, and the reunion with the boy as the plot resolution. These are indeed
evident in both her narratives.
44

Type Component First Second
Narrative Narrative
Settings: Introduce monkey + +
Possession + +
Location in the park + +
Initiating events: Storm + +
Going home + +
Monkey falls + +
Boy arrives home + +
Monkey gone + +
Internal response: Boy sad + -
Goals: [Have monkey] - -
[Find monkey] - -
Attempts(purpose): Search at the park +(-) -
Outcome(resolution): Failure + -
Table 4.8: HC7:Inclusion of planning components: First Episode
Type Component First Second
Narrative Narrative
Settings: Toy store + +
Fixed monkey + +
Initiating events: Boy comes around - +
Boy sees monkey + +
Internal response: Boy excited + -
Goals: [Have monkey] + -
[Get monkey back] + -
Attempts(purpose): Enter the store + +
Ask the doctor + +
Outcome(resolution): Success + +
Table 4.9: HC7: Inclusion of planning components: Last Episode
45

4.4.4 HA27
Type Component First Second
Narrative Narrative
Settings: Introduce monkey + +
Possession + +
Location in the park + +
Initiating events: Storm + +
Going home + +
Monkey falls + +
Boy arrives home + +
Monkey gone + +
Internal response: Boy sad + +
Goals: [Have monkey] - -
[Find monkey] + +
Attempts(purpose): Search at the park +(+) +(+)
Outcome(resolution): Failure +(+) +(+)
Table 4.10: HA27:Inclusion of planning components: First Episode
Tables 4.8 and 4.9 report the planning components this adult subject included in his narratives.
As expected, he included most of the relevant planning components we have noted in
the tables above, and marked them clearly with their information category, in both of the
narratives.
The settings were enriched with background information about the habit of going to the
park (clear use of the ‘Habitual past’ in the second narration) and the events were presented
sequentially with marking of the causal relations between them (“merov geshem nafal hakof ”
“from all the rain fell the monkey”, “kamuvan shehakof lo haya babyit ki hu nafal” “of course
the monkey was not at home because he fell”), Internal responses are sometimes marked with
explicit quotes and a change of intonation that delivers the emotional state (“ima ima hine
hakof sheli!” “mom, mom, here is my monkey!”), attempts are marked with purposes (e.g.
the construction “halchu lechapes” “went to search”) and the resolution wraps out the story
with an added lesson (“umeaz hayeled haya me’ushsar. . . velo nasa yoter ito al ha’ofanayim”
“and since then the child was happy. . . and did not ride with him on the bicycle anymore”).
However, it is interesting to notice the lack of the explicit marking of a high level goal of
getting back a lost object (the attempts in light of this seem somehow more opportunistic
then a constructed plan). This again can be explained by examining the narratives from the
monkey’s perspective. Again, we see that the narrative can be seen as organized around the
goal/plan of the monkey. The enriched settings in this case refer to the monkey’s habits, its
changes of state may lead to internal responses and consequently to another of goals, plans,
attempts and outcomes.
Thus, in the first narrative we find:
“. . . hakof kvar hitchil ligog shehaorev yikach lo gam et ha’ayin hashniya. . . ve’az
46

Type Component First Second
Narrative Narrative
Settings: Toy store + +
Fixed monkey + +
Initiating events: Boy comes around + +
Boy sees monkey + +
Internal response: Boy excited + +
Goals: [Have monkey] - -
[Get monkey back] + +
Attempts(purpose): Enter the store + +
Ask the doctor + +
Outcome(resolution): Success +(+) +(+)
Table 4.11: HA27: Inclusion of planning components: Last Episode
hechlit hakof shehu po lo nish’ar. . . dachaf et atsmo meha’ets. . . vehitchil lipol lever
haritspa.”
“. . . The monkey already started to worry that the magpie will take him his other
eye. . . and then {he} decided that he — here — is not staying. . . pushed himself
off the nest. . . and started to fall towards the floor.”
It is worth mentioning that the same components appeared in also in the second narrative.
Taking the monkey’s point of view as the central one that ‘drives’ the story might partially
explain the lack of explicit marking for the basic, high level goal of the child.
Nevertheless, it shouldn’t be concluded that there is only one perspective used to interpret
the story. On the contrary, it seems that the perspective changes as we go along, marking
different events with IRs, goals/plans and attempts that are ascribed to different protagonists.
For example,“hchuldot hyu me’od nis’arot” “the moles were very excited”, “ha’ish hazaken
hityahsev babayit vehechlit shehu et hakof metaken” “The old man sat around his house and
decided that he — AT the monkey — fixes”.
Lastly, the second narrative was not much shorter that the first one, and included a lot of
redundant and additional information for some of the events. The redundancy of details in the
second story can be explained in terms of use of goal/plan structure to save the information
in memory, in the sense that once there are all the relevant planning components with the
relevant categories of information (settings, IR, attempts) in place, one can easily expand it
with enriched background, emotions, purposes, and so on.
To summarize, this adult subject seemed to make massive use of goal/plan knowledge (1) to
interpret the story the first time, and (2) to pack and retrieve the information to retell the
story with all the redundancy.
4.4.5 HA24
This (female) subject has also included most of the relevant planning components marked
with their clear information categories. Tables 4.12 and 4.13 report the planning components
47

Type Component First Second
Narrative Narrative
Settings: Introduce monkey + +
Possession + +
Location in the park + +
Initiating events: Storm + +
Going home + +
Monkey falls + +
Boy arrives home + +
Monkey gone + +
Internal response: Boy sad + +
Goals: [Have monkey] + +
[Find monkey] + +
Attempts(purpose): Search at the park +(+) +(+)
Outcome(resolution): Failure +(+) +(+)
Table 4.12: HA24:Inclusion of planning components: First Episode
she included in her narratives.
Like the previous subject she also engages herself with providing additional background information
for the settings (names the boy, nicknames the monkey), adding involved quotes for
the protagonists to reflect their IRs, clear marking of purposes (“tsarich lechapes” meaning
that it is required, and almost obligatory to look for the monkey), and clear plot resolution.
In her narration we can see clearer evidence for the kid’s high level goal to get the lost monkey
back, as she added another part (the boy convincing the mother to go on and look for it) to
the interpretation of the scene where they go to look for the lost monkey.
Thus, it seems odd that she leaves out an important component of the second episode (namely,
the reinstatement of the child’s plan). However this does appear in the second narrative. In
fact, this is easy to explain in the sense that she did not recognize the boy from the beginning
of the story. She instantiated another protagonist, and started to infer his goal/plan from
scratch. However, once she realizes it is the same boy (clearly marked with the surprised
phrase “Hafle vafele” that characterizes almost magical appearances in Hebrew fairytales)
she makes the connection to the original plan, and completes the story with its resolution.
Evidently, this phenomena does not exist in her second narrative, since this information is
already packed within a higher order goal/plan of the boy and she easily mark the second
episode with the relevant IRs to seeing the monkey, the Attempt to reach out for it, and the
successful Outcome.
Lastly, here again we can find evidence for interpretation of the story from different perspectives,
and thus use of goals/plans to interpret the actions of different protagonists. Namely,
the hedgehogs’ decision to rescue the monkey, the fisherman’s decision and constructive attempts
to fix the monkey, and so on.
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4.4.6 HA29
Type Component First Second
Narrative Narrative
Settings: Toy store + +
Fixed monkey + +
Initiating events: Boy comes around + +
Boy sees monkey + +
Internal response: Boy excited + +
Goals: [Have monkey] - +
[Get monkey back] - +
Attempts(purpose): Enter the store +(-) +(+)
Ask the doctor +(-) +(+)
Outcome(resolution): Success +(+) +(+)
Table 4.13: HA24: Inclusion of planning components: Last Episode
This subject has included all of the relevant planning components in his narratives (see tables
4.14 and 4.15).
Again, this adult is providing additional information about setting, quotes of protagonists for
internal responses, clear marking of attempts with intentions or purposes (“hechelit” decided,
“ratsa” wanted, etc) and clear statements of the outcome, and eventually the plot resolution.
Similarly to my other adult subjects, he changes the perspective as we progress and uses
goal/plan knowledge to interpret the actions of each and every one of the protagonists, namely
the boy (to have the monkey back), the mother (to make her boy happy), the mice (to check
what they can do with the monkey) the hedgehog (to adopt the monkey) the bird (to add the
monkey to its collection) and the fisherman (to fix the monkey). Moreover, when encountering
protagonists without apparent goal, namely the bees, he clearly states that ‘he doesn’t see
how they are connected to the story’.
Each of these goals is realized in a plan of its own, with dynamically changing subordinate
goals. For example the mice altering their attempts as the hedgehog arrives (“ha’achbarim
dey hitbayshu shehem hifshitu et hakof. . . hem hilbishu oto chazara” “the mice were ashamed
that they undressed the monkey. . . they dress him {it} back” ), the bird decides to give up
the monkey and stick to its eye when realizing it’s too big for the nest, etc.
It goes almost without saying that all relevant planning components, with respect to the goal
plans of all the protagonists, re-appear in the second narrative.
4.5 Results
To summarize my findings, the analysis provides supporting evidence for growing use of goal
plan structure with age.
49

Type Component First Second
Narrative Narrative
Settings: Introduce monkey + +
Possession + +
Location in the park + +
Initiating events: Storm + +
Going home + +
Monkey falls + +
Boy arrives home + +
Monkey gone + +
Internal response: Boy sad + +
Goals: [Have monkey] + +
[Find monkey] + +
Attempts(purpose): Search at the park +(+) +(+)
Outcome(resolution): Failure +(+) +(+)
Table 4.14: HA29:Inclusion of planning components: First Episode
Type Component First Second
Narrative Narrative
Settings: Toy store + +
Fixed monkey + +
Initiating events: Boy comes around + +
Boy sees monkey + +
Internal response: Boy excited + +
Goals: [Have monkey] + +
[Get monkey back] + +
Attempts(purpose): Enter the store +(+) +(+)
Ask the doctor +(+) +(+)
Outcome(resolution): Success +(+) +(+)
Table 4.15: HA29: Inclusion of planning components: Last Episode
50

The child subjects, especially the pre-schooler girls, included only partially the crucial planning
components of the goal/plan from the boy’s perspective. However, it seems more plausible
that the goal/plan perspective around which they interpreted and built the entire narrative
is the Monkey’s perspective. This seems a little odd at first sight as the monkey seems quite
passive, and it doesn’t seem natural 1 to ascribe IRs, goals and derived plans, to a stuffed
animal. However it is a clearer fit for explaining the planning components that are in fact
included in the narratives, and moreover, it helps to explain the structure of the second, much
condensed narrative of each of the children. In the second narrative the several experiences
the monkey went through are folded into short phrases, steps in the higher level goal of the
monkey to get home to his owner. It is also aligned with the higher level of detail used to
describe the toy doctor’s episode (in all children’s narratives) as it is perceived as essential
for the return of the monkey home, even without knowing what happens next.
The adult subjects, included most, or all, of the crucial learning components for the boys
underlying goal/plan, but not exclusively. The adults seem to change perspective as new
protagonists were introduced and each and every protagonist was ascribed with a goal and
plan that later allowed them to interpret its actions. Moreover, the adults’ second narratives
were almost as long as the first ones, and sometime included redundant information that
did not appear in the first one. This can be explained folding all events into a hierarchical
structure, that unfolds online, ‘on demand’ rather then remembering a long-lasting linear line
of occurrences.
Lastly, we can identify the progress from a linearly ordered temporal sequence of events to
a hierarchical order of events that are causally related in the different linguistic forms used
by children and adults. While children made massive use of the words ‘(ve)az’ ‘(and) then’, 2
‘acharey ze’ ‘after that’, and ‘achar kach’ ‘afterwards’ to order the events in the narrative,
the adults hardly used this forms at all. Alternatively they used relative clauses governed
by the prefixes ‘she..’ ‘that’ and ‘kshe..’ ‘when’, adverbs such as ‘pit’om’ ‘suddenly’, and
connectives such as ‘velachen’ ‘and so’ and ‘biglal’ ‘because’, in order to organize the events
through causal relations rather than in a temporal order of occurrence.
1 to us, adults. . . ;)
2 You can see a strikingly long sequence and phrases connected only by ‘and then’ in the transcript of HC7.
51

Chapter 5
Using Different Linguistic Forms to
Mark Temporal Aspect in Modern
Hebrew
5.1 Theoretical Discussion
5.1.1 Tense, Aspect and Hebrew
In this chapter we are concerned with the development of linguistic forms in children’s language,
and more specifically, we are interested in the development of linguistic forms that are
used to talk about time in Modern Hebrew. The term linguistic forms refers to the grammatical
morphology, syntax, word order and lexicon in Modern Hebrew (most of which I have
already discussed in general in chapter 3), and in this chapter we are going to investigate how
these forms are used to talk about time.
We have already suggested in 1.2.1 that our conscious experience of time is a construction
on top of events, so ‘talking about time’ basically corresponds to locating and interrelating
events in time in a narrative. This can be done using different means that are available in
(almost any) given language, namely:
1. Tense/Aspect — The temporal distinctions that are encoded in verb phrases (e.g. future/past
tense, perfective/imperfective aspect)
2. Event conflation — Grammatical means to characterize the components of events in
terms of location, manner, temporality etc. (e.g. using satellite prepositions of the verb
go-in/go-out move-in/move-on)
3. Perspective — Morphological and syntactical means to highlight or downgrade events
(e.g. word order)
4. Connectivity — The syntactic means to “pack” events into multi-clause constructions
(e.g. relative clauses)
52

Different languages offer different sets of options for each of the categories. A skilled narrator
is assumed on the one hand to exploit the options suggested by the langauge, and on the other
to devote more narrative attention to encode notions for which there are limited expressive
options in their native languages.
In this chapter we are mostly concerned with Tense and Aspect. In general, there are fundamental
differences between the two. Tense marks the location of events in time, while
aspect marks the temporal contour of events, or as Comerie puts it, the internal temporal
constituency of a situation. Tense marks a fairly objective event characteristic, 1 while aspect
is dependent on the speaker’s chosen perspective on an event. In most European languages
Tense is grammaticalized. Aspect can be either grammaticalized (i.e. encoded in the morphology
of the verb) or lexicalized (expressed in the inherent meaning of words).
Roughly speaking, aspect is concerned with the “on-goingness” and completion of events. It
allows the narrator to view a situation from an internal point of view (ongoing, enduring)
,or from an external point (completed). More formally, aspect characterizes the situation in
terms of
1. Imperfective vs. Perfective
2. Progressive vs. Non Progressive
3. Telic vs. Atelic
Hebrew has a very limited system of obligatory grammatical marking of Tense/Aspect comparing
to other European languages such as English. It has only five grammaticalized inflections
marking tense and mood, namely Infinite, Imperative, Past, Present and Future (see 3).
Relative tense, i.e. the notion of simultaneity, prospective, and anteriority can be encoded
using tense shifting in relative clauses. For example, “hem ra’u she’ananim shchorim olim
baraki’a” “They saw that black clouds are growing in the sky” (HA27).
For expressing aspect, 2 Hebrew has the following devices, all of which are lexical:
1. Derivational morphology (i.e. ‘binyanim’, see 3.4.2)
2. Verbs of aspect (e.g. ‘hitchil’ ‘begin to’, ‘siyem’ ‘finish to’)
3. Adverbial words and phrases (e.g. ‘pit’om’ ‘suddenlly’)
4. Repetition (e.g. “hem halchu halchu halchu. . . ” “They walked walked walked. . . ”
(HA27)
In the following chapter we will first investigate how these devices are used to mark aspect
in verbs and verb phrases for mature native Hebrew speakers, and later on we will try to see
how they are developed in the children’s language.
1 I leave out the issue of relative time for the moment.
2 Also extended aspect.
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5.1.2 The Aktionsarten
The idea of classifying verbs with respect to their time schemata was first suggested by
Vendler, and it led to the linguistic notion of Aktionsarten or aspectual classes. Linguists
distinguish five aspectual classes, namely points, states, activities, achievements, and accomplishments.
These classes refer to events 3 rather then to actual verbs or verb phrases. We
will see later that verbs may be ascribed to different categories in different constellations.
The list below exemplifies the different Aktionsarten:
1. Points flash, spot, blink
2. States love, know, be lost, be a president
3. Activity (strict) run, draw
As opposed to states, an activity is characterized by continuous change that is a result
of some input/effort put into it. An activity can be identified, for instance, by the
adverbial modification “for two hours”.
4. Actvity (wide) push a cart
Activities are wide in the sense of being transitive, affecting some other object (in that
case, the cart).
5. Achievement reach at the top
Achievements are strongly connected with a change of state, and are usually characterized
by a canonical goal (to be at the top, in our case).
6. Accomplishment build a house, draw a circle
Accomplishments involve a continuous change of state like activities (building, drawing),
but also have a canonical goal (the completion of the building of the house, for instance),
like achievements. An accomplishment can be identified by the adverbial modification
“in two hours”.
These classes are not inherent in the lexical meaning of a verb, rather, two verb phrases constructed
from the same verb might have a different Aktionsart attached to them. For example,
“John drank beer” is an activity, however “John drank a glass of beer” is an accomplishment.
Conversely, “Mary read a book” is an accomplishment, however “Mary read a book for two
hours” is an activity. This phenomena in which verbs move from one Aktionsart to another
in different constructions is called Coercion. It is worth stressing that this is a general notion,
and is not exclusively related to accomplishments and activities. For instance consider “A
visitor arrived” (achievement) and “visitors arrived all night” (activity).
Clearly the Aktionsarten of verbs/verb phrases is another device to encode aspect in the
language. As a part of our investigation of the aspect in Hebrew we will try to find correlations
between verbs and grammatical constructions in Hebrew and the different Aktionsarten. In
addition, we will try to identify whether there is room in Hebrew for the phenomenon of
coercion.
3 In the informal sense, or eventualities in (van Lambalgen and Hamm, 2004).
54

5.2 Method of Analysis
Reference Event in complete?
Picture question
[[51]] dress monkey back +
[[51]] pull monkey’s eyes -
[[51]] Fix monkey +
Table 5.1: Questions for investigating completion
Reference Event in progressive
Picture question
[[17]] dressing monkey +
[[26]] going on a trip +
[[23]] pulling monkeys eye +
[[31]] monkey is falling +
[[41]] fixing monkey +
Table 5.2: Questions for investigating the progressive
In conducting the analysis we are going to use all the three components of the experiment
(see 2.2.2). The method of analyzing the texts will be as follows.
First we will limit ourselves to the two first components (i.e. telling and re-telling the story)
and for we locate all the verbs/verb phrases and consider their inflections. We expect the
use of a dominant tense to anchor the story either in the past or in the present, and little
time shifting or alternation. We identify the dominant time, and then consider individual
alternations and try to to find out what purpose they are supposed to serve.
Within the set of verbs we have identified, we look for repetition or complex complements in
the infinitive form (in particular those that are built on top of verbs that mark aspect, such
as ‘begin to’) and see how they are used to mark aspect within the verbs/verb phrases.
Lastly, we look for all adverbial words and adverbial clauses and again try to understand
what the narrator is trying to mark using these adverbial expressions.
Then, we limit the discussion to specific events with certain aspectual properties namely
completion (tables 5.1 and progression 5.2). For this phase I rely on the data of the third
component of the experiment (question answering).
Since there are very few options for tenses that can be used to narrate the event, I first ask
an open question, to see what morphological patterns, constructions or lexical items are used
by the narrator in order to capture the aspect. Then, I try to refine the answer by asking
more detailed questions that use aspectual verbs (begin/finish/stop). By this I try to capture
both the default aspectual meaning of the three tenses and to pin down the devices used to
mark ‘completion’ and ‘progression’.
I repeat this process with a different set of pictures that are related to different Aktionsarten
55

Reference Event in Aktionsart
Picture question
[[8]] boy is sad state
[[11]] mice pull monkey activity
[[14]] tail ripped achievement
[[19]] mice push monkey activity
[[11]] hedgehog enters achievement
[[39]] doctor arrives home achievement
[[42]] doctor is fixing monkey activity
[[44]] doctor fixed monkey accomplishment
Table 5.3: Questions for investigating Aktionsarten
(table 5.3). The goal of this phase is to find a correlation between verb phrases (including the
verb, its morphological pattern and grammatical construction) and classes of Aktionsarten.
For the last two phases I use the redundant data from the first two components to compare
and contrast narration of the same events in order to find supporting evidence for my findings.
5.3 Guiding Assumptions and Predictions
With respect to the use of tenses, I assume children above the age of three have already
mastered the use the three tenses. I expect less time shifting/alternation in the narration of
the story as the age increase, however I expect that when alternation appears in older ages,
it is deliberately used to serve some purpose.
With respect to the marking of aspect in the language, I expect to find some supporting
evidence for the following hypotheses:
1. The default meaning of a verb in the past tense is of a completed event.
2. The default meaning of a verb in the present tense is of an ongoing event.
3. The use of the aspectual verb ‘begin to’ on top of the main verb is used to mark an
incomplete event.
4. The use of aspectual verb ‘stop to’ on top of the main verb is used to mark an event
that was ongoing but not completed.
5. The use of aspectual verb ‘finish to’ on top of the main verb is used to mark an event
that was ongoing, that was completed.
As aspect markers are not obligatory, I expect them to appear relatively late in the process
of langues acquisition.
With respect to the Aktionsarten, I expect to find (some) correlation between the classes and
the morphological pattern ‘binyanim’. In addition, I expect that to find some grammatical
construction that add category of the event at hand (e.g. relative clauses). Also, I expect
room for coercion even within those categories.
56

Total Past Habit Past/ Present Future Imperative Infinitive
Past Present
1 210(28) 174(15) 0 12(2) 23(9) 6(3) 1 4
2 160() 128(8) 2 9 12(2) 6(3) 1 2
Table 5.4: HA27-Tenses: This table summarize the use of different grammatical tenses in the
two narratives (in brackets: the number of inflections complemented with the infinitive form)
5.4 Analysis
5.4.1 HA27
Tenses
In his first narrative HA27 used 210 verb/verb phrase constructions. 4 . The table below
summarizes the use of different tenses.
Clearly the dominant tense here is the past tense (˜82%). The deviations from the past tense
are consistently used to serve some purpose. The shifting to present tense is mainly used for
one of the following purposes
1. To set background information, (mostly in the first phases).
2. To express simultaneity, or more accurately to express that one event overlaps another
ongoing activity.
“Hem ra’u she’ananim shchorim olim baraki’a”
“They saw that black clouds are growing in the sky”
3. To indicate immediate intention to do something
“Hu hechelit shehu et hakof metaken”
“He decided that he — the monkey 5 — fixes”
4. To indicate ongoingness/non-completion
“et hakof matsu chuldot. . . vehaima vehayeled mamshichim leachpes”
“AT The monkey-mols found. . . and the boy and the mother are continuing
to search”
5. Used as adjectives in phrases that indicate states
“Hakof lavush” “The monkey is dressed”
Future tense is used to indicate unreal situations, purposes, or plans; things that are likely to
be realized (or not) in the future. For example,
4 This indicates a lower bound on the number of clauses since some of the sentences in Hebrew lack the verb
(see section 3.1)
5 VS inversion to focus on monkey.
57

“Sam lo ayin chadasha kedey sheyuchal lirot”
“He put him a new eye so that he will be able to see ”
“bo nikanes venistakel”
“come we will go in and will have a look
Note how the imperative at the beginning of the sentence engages the boy with the plan, and
how the mini-plan is detailed using the future tense.
In addition, note that in Hebrew the set of verbs of binyan NIFAL 3rd person are ambiguous
and can be interpreted either as past or present.
The isolated infinitives are mostly used in a nominalized form
.
“lo yadu ma laasot” “did not know what to-do”
In the second narrative we see somewhat similar phenomena. The dominant tense is still past
(81%), however there is less use of the present, which is somewhat replaced by habitual past to
describe setting and backgrounds. Present is mostly used to encode immediate intentions and
future used to encode canonical goals and mini-plans. The gerunds and imperatives appear
in similar contexts.
Aspectual verbs
There is a notable use of aspectual verbs (e.g. hitchil l. . . ‘started to’, mamshichim l. . .
‘continuing to’), in both of the narratives, in past and present attached to an infinitive form
of the verb in question. There is a total of 12 such constructions in the negative (8 of which
use the ‘started to’, one of which uses ‘continuing to’) and 7 in the second one (all of which
use ‘started to’).
The use of such a construction in these narratives is characterized by pictures that encode
situations in which one event is ongoing and another interrupts, or to describe an ongoing
event that has started but is not yet completed.
E.g.
.
(1)“hitchil lareder geshem” “it started to rain”[[6]]
(2)“sam oto al hagav vehitchil laleceht” “Put him in his back and started to
walk”[[22]]
(3)“hitchil lipol le’ever haritspa” “Started to fall towards the floor”[[33]]
Note that the use of the construction in the last example is almost pragmatic, and it supports
the claim the past has default meaning of completion. What we see in the picture is a falling
monkey. The story is anchored in the past, however, using ‘fell’ will indicate that the event
was complete. Adding seemingly redundant information about ‘starting to fall’ hints at the
fact that the falling is not yet completed.
Other than constructions with aspectual verbs we see also constructions with modal verbs
(‘can find. . . ’, ‘must take. . . ’) or verbs that indicate intention (‘decided to fix. . . ’). These
58

constructions are mainly used to set background (“you can find there”, “you can see that”)
or to encode goal/plan structure (see previous chapter). However they seem to be helpful
also in marking aspect in the same way that aspectual verbs do, as they are used in contexts
of events that have already started, but will only be complete in the future (if at all). Thus,
picture 41 (where the doctor is fixing the monkey but has not yet completed) is narrated as
“hechlit letaken”, “decided to fix” rather then simply ‘fixed’.
Derivational morphology
In this section we are concerned with the verbal forms, binyanim, that are used in the narrative.
We can see that in both parts there was a large variety of binyanim that are used in
the derivations of the verbs. The most common one is binyan PAAL (KAL) however we can
still find significant use of other patterns:
1. HIF’IL hitchil, higia, hilbish started, arrived, dressed
2. NIFAL nikra, nishbar got-ripped, got-broken
3. HITPAEL hit’ofef, histekel, hityashev flew-around, look-about, sat-down
The verbs used in binyan HIFIL are all achievements or accomplishments. This makes sense
since we have mentioned before that the verb HIFIL captures the a meaning of “causing
something to happen”, the result of it is actually the canonical goal of the achievements and
accomplishments. Also, the ‘causing’ is intimately connected to a change of state, which is
also characteristic of achievements accomplishments.
The use of binyan NIFAL is more tricky to characterize, as the use of this binyan in third
person is ambiguous between past and present. This is not very surprising however since the
use of binyan NIFAL (conveniently translated as ‘got-verb+ed’) can also be associated with
a change of state. The expression nikra ‘got-ripped’, for instance, refers to a time interval
in which the object is complete in the beginning and ripped at the end. That is, somewhere
within this interval it got ripped. Thus I see it as apropriate to encode achievements.
The use of binyan HITPAEL is the most interesting. First, the translations of this verb usually
have a satellite preposition that alters the meaning, and makes it somewhat continuous in
time. Notable, the term hitofef ‘flew around’ is not commonly used in Hebrew, however it
was used here to describe picture 6 in which the monkey is falling off the bicycle. The use of
‘nafal’/’‘af’ ‘fell/flew’ in binyan PAAL does not capture the ongoingness of the flying that is
captured in the picture, thus the narrator adjusts it, using a term that is less common, to be
more suitable.
The verb ‘to-be’
The verb ‘to be’ in its past inflection, or sentences that lack any verb (those implicitly include
the meaning of the verb ‘to-be’ inflected in the present) are mostly used (as in English) to
describe states.
59

(1)“Hayled verkof hayu beyachad tamis” “The monkey and the kid were always
together”
(2)“Bachuts kar veratuv” “Outside it is cold and wet”
Adverbial words and clauses
There is evidence in both of the narrative of the use of adverbial expressions in roughly 5%
of the clauses. The main ones that are used repeatedly are:
1. Acharey she. . . (masheu kara) after that. . . (something had happened)
2. ad she. . . (masheu kara) until that. . . (something happened)
3. Pit’om/lefeta. . . mashehu kara suddenly. . . (something happened)
The first adverbial expression is used to mark relative tense, in the same way past is used
together with past perfect. For example,
.
“Acharey shehakof yashan, lakach oto ha’ish hazaken”
“After that the monkey slept, took him — the old man —”
“Acharey shehitchil geshem, hakof hit’ofef ”
“After that rain started, the monkey flew around”
Note that in the first example, an achievement marks the completion of the other event of
type ‘activity’, sleeping. In the second example however it is the other way round, an activity
starts right after an event of type achievement takes place.
The second adverbial clause, ad she. . . is used to mark interruption of an action that was
ongoing. In a sense it is similar to the use of past progressive in English. For example,
“shama nish’ar hakof, ad she’ala bechakato shel dayag zaken...”
Lit:“There stayed the monkey, until he was caught in an old man’s hook...”
Mean:“The monkey was staying there until he got caught in an old man’s hook”
The third adverbial word, Pit’om, or its more formal notation lefeta, is very common in
Hebrew storytelling, and is used to mark a sudden, often surprising, twist in the thread of
the story. More to our concern is the fact that it, in a similar way to the previous clauses,
marks the end of a state or an activity which was ongoing and introduces a new event which
is more short in its duration (point or achievement).
“sham yashav hakof. . . ulefeta ra’a et hayeled. . . ”
“There sat the monkey, and suddenly he saw the boy. . . ”
“mashach. . . pitom ra’a sheze kof ”
“pulled, all of a sudden saw its a monkey. . . ”
Note that the meaning of the verb ‘see’ used here coincide with an event of type ‘recognize’.
60

Repetition
Reference Event in Selected
Picture question form 6
[[51]] dress monkey back hilbishu/dressed
[[51]] pull monkey’s eyes hitchila lehotci/started to pull
[[51]] Fix monkey tiken/fixed
Table 5.5: HA27: Questions for investigating completion
Reference Event in selected
Picture question form 7
[[17]] dressing monkey malbishim/dressing
[[26]] going on a trip lokachat letyul/take to a trip
[[23]] pulling monkeys eye tolesh ayin/pulling an eye
[[31]] monkey is falling nofel lamayim/falling to the water
[[41]] fixing monkey metaken et hakof /fixing the monkey
Table 5.6: HA27: Questions for investigating the progressive
There are 3 uses of repetition in (both of) the narratives, one of the 3 is strikingly long:
(1)“Hem chipsu bapark, hem chipsu mitachat laets” “The searched in the park,
the searched under the tree”[[10]]
(2)“mashcu po mashchu sham” “pulled here, pulled there”[[13]]
(3)“halchu halchu halchu halchu halchu halchu halchu halchu” “walked walked
walked walked walked walked walked walked” [[27]]
All of these are used to describe an activity that is ongoing in the picture. Thus, repetition
seem to be helpful in stressing the ongoing or iterative nature of the event.
Answers to questions
Tables 5.5, 5.6 and 5.7, summarize the results of the data from the third component.
Clearly we can find more evidence here that past forms encode completion, and if an event in
the past is not complete there is a redundancy where an aspectual verb is used. Present tense
is used to encode the progressive. It is also used to describe activities. Achievements are
usually marked using verbs in past tense, while encoding accomplishment was done using the
aspectual verb ‘finished to’, probably to encode that the event is more then an achievement,
and required a continuous effort to be put into it.
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Reference selected encoded
Picture form Aktionsart
[[8]] boche/is crying activity
[[11]] moshchim/are pulling activity
[[14]] nikra/got ripped achivement
[[44]] siyem letaken/finished to fix accomplishment
Table 5.7: HA27: Questions for investigating Aktionsarten
62

Total Past Habit Past/ Present Future Imperative Infinitive
Past Present
1 100(11) 83(8) 0 10 4(1) 3(2) 0 0
2 97(10) 78(8) 0 5 12(2) 1 1 0
Table 5.8: HA24-Tenses: This table summarize the use of different grammatical tenses in the
two narratives (in brackets: the number of inflections complemented with the infinitive form)
5.4.2 HA24
Tenses
This adult subject provided significantly shorter narratives, however similar to each other in
length. Again, we see that she anchored her stories in the past, and that deviations from
these tenses are deliberate and serve some purpose. Table 5.8 shows a summary of the tenses
used in both of the narratives.
In the first narrative I present a total of 83% verbs in the past however it is in fact more than
90% as the verbs defined as ambiguous make sense in their surrounding context if taken to
be in the past.
So we have 7 inflection of verbs that are not in past forms, 4 in the present form and 3 in the
future form. The alternation to present form is used to serve the following purposes:
1. To express simultaneousness.
“vera’a et col ha’achbarim shehem nitpalim lekofifo”
“And saw all the mice that the are picking on kofifo” “pitom hem ra’u
anan. . . magia” “Suddenly they saw a cloud arriving”
We can see here that in the first example an activity that is ongoing is interrupted
by another event. In the first example the activity is picking on kofifo 8 , in the second
example however it is the ‘arriving’ denoted by its present inflection. 9
2. To mark immediate intentions, in this case using a construction with modal verbs
“vehechlit shehu rotse lakachat et kofifo”
“And decided that he want to take kofifo”
This in fact encodes the goal of the bird to take the monkey and actually refers to the
preceding pictures and not the current one.
3. To describe a state
“hu ra’a et kofifo. . . vehechelit shehu me’od chamud”
“He saw kofiko and decided that he is very nice”
8 Kofifo is known toy monkey character in Hebrew cartoons
9 Note that we are used to seeing the verb ‘arrive’ with a default Aktionsart of achievement, however here
it is coerced to activity. The Hebrew classification in this context is similar to the one in English.
63

The three uses of Future tense all encode intention and actually mark mini-plans of the
protagonists (see previous chapter). However, it is interesting to note how these mini-plans
are used to describe an event that clearly has started but hasn’t been completed yet. In the
following example the event at hand is going into the store to ask for the monkey.
“Hu bikesh. . . shehem yikansu”
“He asked. . . that they will go in” [[49]]
In the second narrative however, there is much more shifting to present tense. These are
mostly used to add children’s story characteristics by means of quotes of the protagonists,
and redundant information about background, habits, and states of the protagonists.
E.g
“Kmo shehu bederch klal ose im kol miney dvarim shehu motse bapark”
“like he usually does with all the things he finds in the park”
“Hu higia letachtit ha’agam, kulo ratuv veharus”
“He arrived to the bottom of the lake, all wet and ruined”
Note that the last example describes the monkey’s state in the past, which is anchored in the
first clause. Again we find here, in a slightly different version, the notion of simultaneity.
The future is used again, together with an imperative to encode the mini-plan to go home in
the face of the rain, and is again a quotation of the mother protagonist.
Aspectual verbs
Its clearly shown in the table that a significant share of the verb phrases encode complex verb
constructions — about 20% in the first narrative, and about 10% in the second one.
In the first narrative, about half of them include the aspectual verb hitchil ‘started’, and the
other half use verbs that encode intentions; hechelit ‘decided’, and nisa ‘tried’. Both types
of phrases are used to describe an event that has already started, is clearly ongoing, and not
complete, e.g.
“Yts’u im mitria vehitchilu lechapes”
“Went out with an umbrella and started to look for (. . . the monkey)”[[9]]
“. . . vehechelitu lakachat oto itam letiyul”
“And decided to take him with them for a walk”[[26]]
The ongoing activities are the search for the monkey in the first example, and walking around
with the hedgehogs in the second one.
In the second narrative she does not refer to a specific picture and thus she use such constructions
to refer to activities that were ongoing and interrupted or stopped E.g
“Yts’u lapark vehitchilu leached”
“Went to the park and started to play”[[9]]
“mishpachat hakipodim. . . hechelita latchet oto its”
“The hedgehogs family. . . decided to take him with her (. . . for a walk)”
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(In the first example, the activity of playing in the park was interrupted by the unpredictable
rain, and in the second example the walk in the park was interrupted by the attack of the
bird.)
The verb ‘to be’
The inflection of the verb ‘to be’ in the past tense, and the verbless clauses in the present
tense are used to denote states.
E.g.
“hu haya atsuv” “He was sad”
“kulo haya male achbaroshim magilim” “He was all full of ugly rats”
Derivational morphology (binyanim)
Again we identify the use of a wide range of verbal forms, binyanim. The list below gives
partial examples:
1. HIFIL herim, her’a, hitchil, hishlich, hivchin ‘picked up, showed, started, threw, noticed’
Almost all occurrences of verbs in binyan HIFIL are of achievements (including the ones
that are not listed here). However an interesting exception is an inflection of this verbal
form in the present: magia ‘arriving’. In this case the progressive characteristic of the
present “takes over” and it is classified as an activity in this context.
2. NIFAL ne’elam, nirtav, nitpas ‘disappeared, got-wet, got-caught’
Again, all are clearly associated with change of state and thus can be plausibly viewed
as achievements, however, there are other occurrences of this form for which this is not
the case, e.g. nitpal as of picking on somebody, which in this context is classified an
activity. It is interesting to note, however, that this verbal form is of ambiguous time. If
in the context it is interpreted as a present form then it is more likely to be an activity,
and if it is taken as a past tense form it encodes a change of state.
3. PIEL tipel, chimem, yibesh ‘took care of, asked, warmed, dried (something)’
PIEL is the ‘heavy conjugation’ and is generally characterized by activities in the wide
sense, i.e. ‘doing something to somebody’, (or more simply, transitive). This applies
for denoted examples and for the occurrences I have identifies in the both narratives.
With the default completion denoted by the past form, it is often useful to encode
accomplishments. However it can also denote ongoing activities.
4. HITPAEL hitlabesh, hit’alel, hityabesh, mistakel ‘dressed oneself, tortured, became dry,
is looking’
As noted before, binyan HITPAEL is the middle voice counterpart of binyan PIEL. In
all those cases the use of binyan hitpael implies that the activity is, or was, ongoing.
65

It is interesting to contrast yibesh in the previous form with hityabesh in this one since
they are both derived from the same root. Consider
“hu yibesh et hakof” “He dried the monkey”
“hakof hityabesh” “The monkey became dry”
While yibesh is more concerned with the canonical goal of the target object being dry,
and thus encodes an achievement, hityabesh is concerned with the process of getting
dry, and thus denotes an activity.
Adverbial words and clauses
7 clauses of the first narrative included an adverbial word or clause, 5 of which were the
adverb pitom ‘suddenly’ introduced in the previous section. E.g.
“pitom hem ra’u anan. . . magia” “Suddenly they saw a cloud arriving”[[4]]
“pitom orem. . . ra’a otam holchim” “Suddenly a magpie. . . saw them walking”[[28]]
In both cases the word pitom encodes an interruption of an ongoing event, expressed also by
the time alternation between present and past.
In addition she introduced the adverb miyad ‘immediately’, accompanied by an event of type
achievement:
“miyad hivchin bekofifo ” “he immediately noticed kofifo’[[28]]
In the second narrative, 4 out of 9 adverbial terms used coincide with the notion of ‘suddenly’
introduced before (lefeta/pitom usually followed by a time alternation), another use of miyad
‘immediately’ that accompanies an achievement (‘immediately realized’), and three are in
the scope of embedded clauses and are used to encode simultaneity. The more interesting
example is
“be’oedam holchim letiyul, orev hivchin bahem”
“while they are going for a walk, a magpie noticed them”
In this construction there is an adverbial clause be’oedam holchim letiyul that coincides with
the meaning of ‘while’ in English and encodes an ongoing activity in the present form, which
is interrupted by the event in focus. Note that this is different from English in the sense that
although there is a use of present tense in the subordinate clause, it clearly takes place in the
past since it coincides with a different event, ‘noticed’, both of them occurred in the past.
Repetition
There was only one use of repetition in the data, which is in the second narrative, that is
used to encode searching for monkey. In the same clause there is also an indication of the
(unsuccessful) completion of the search.
“chipsu chipsu velo matsu” “They searched searched and didn’t find”
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Reference Event in Selected
Picture question form 10
[[51]] dress monkey back lo hilbishu/did not dress
[[51]] pull monkey’s eyes lo hotsi/did not pull
[[51]] Fix monkey tiken/fixed
Table 5.9: HA24: Questions for investigating completion
Reference Event in selected
Picture question form 11
[[17]] dressing monkey hem nisu lehotsi lo et habgadim/they tried to take off his cloths
[[26]] going on a trip lokchu oto letyul/took him on to a trip
[[23]] pulling monkeys eye nisa lehotsi/tried to pull
[[31]] monkey is falling nofel lamayim/falling to the water
[[41]] fixing monkey tiken/hitchil letaken/fixed/started to fix 12
Table 5.10: HA24: Questions for investigating the progressive
It is interesting to note that the use of the verb in the past tense seems to encode completion,
however the repetition stressed the fact that it was an ongoing/iterative process before it
ended.
Answers to questions
The tables 5.9, 5.10 and 5.11 show a summary report of data from the third component.
Again it is interesting to note that there is an avoidance of the use of the past form in cases
where the event is not complete.
Also, it is interesting to see how events that are ongoing are marked with constructions of
aspectual verb with the verb the activity verb in the infinitive form (this was used for all the
progressive picture). When an action is not complete, she prefers to mark the initiating event
or the overall intention form rather then using a simple past form that will implicitly imply
completion. Lastly, all the Aktionsart got entirely different interpretation. This is caused
by taking different point of view on the event described in the picture. We have already
mentioned that aspect is not an objective matter, and here we see some evidence for that.
5.4.3 HA29
This narrative is anchored in the past with the share of past inflected verbs including habitual
past constructions being roughly 80% in the first narrative and 85% in the second one. Table
5.12 summarizes the use of tenses in both narratives.
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Reference selected encoded
Picture form Aktionsart
[[8]] hivchin shehakof ne’elam/notice the monkey is gone achievement
[[11]] hitchilu lehitapel/started to pick on him achievement
[[14]] shavru lo et hazanav/broke his tail achievement
[[44]] hakof mavri/the monkey is getting better activity
Table 5.11: HA24: Questions for investigating Aktionsarten
Total Past Habit Past/ Present Future Imperative Infinitive
Past Present
1 170(15) 130(13) 7 7 12(1) 8(1) 1 5
2 140(14) 109(1) 2(1) 6 14(2) 7 1 1
Table 5.12: HA29-Tenses: This table summarize the use of different grammatical tenses in
the two narratives (in brackets: the number of inflections complemented with the infinitive
form)
Tenses
In the two first paragraphs of the first narrative we see a massive use of the habitual past
construction to anchor the narrative in the past and to provide background information. E.g.
“hu haya lokeach oto keshehaya yotse letayel bapark”
lit: “He was taking him when he was going out to walk in the park”
Meaning: “He used to take him to his walks in the park”
And he includes a reference to the future hu haya doeg shetamid yihiye lo tov literally: “He
was taking care that he will always have feel good”, setting up background for the entire
future course of events.
Later, he switches from past to present only to describe states, to set the background information,
and in the scope of protagonist’s quotes. All are deliberately used to add a “storytelling”
contour to the narrative:
“kmo sheyadu’a kipodim mefachadim me’orvim” “As it is known hedgehogs are
afraid of magpies”
“ima shelo yad’a kama hu ohev et hakof ” “His mother knew how much he loves
the monkey”
“amar ‘chaval,hu tofes harbe makom’” “{He} said ‘too bad, he is occupying a lot
of space’ ”
Alternations to future tense are mostly used to encode intentions, hopes, and mini-plans of
the protagonist: 13
13 We have already mentioned that this adult narrative included a handful of planning components with
respect to all of the protagonists perspectives.
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“ze yihiye ra’ayon nechmad lishmor oto” “It will be a good idea to keep him”
“bo nikanes venivdok” “Come we will go in and will check” (let’s go in and check)
Also, it is worth mentioning that there were at least five occurrences of verbs in their infinitive
forms, in various forms of nominalizations:
“eyn li ma la’asot” “I do not have what to-do” (I have nothing to do)
“bli laharos oto yoter miday” “Without to-ruin it too much” (without ruining. . . )
We can see here a remarkable difference from English, where the suffix ing is available for
this kind of nominalization. 14
In the second narrative, we observe more or less similar phenomena; use of present to set
background information and to quote the protagonist, use of future to encode wishes, goals
and plans, and some use of the infinitive in various nominalizations.
In addition, there is use of time shifting in embedded clauses to encode simultaneity of events,
similar to what we have seen before, e.g. “hu ra’a shehakipod metsits. . . ” “He saw that the
hedgehog peeks. . . ”.
Aspectual verbs
In both narratives we see that about 10% of verb phrases use constructions with an inflected
aspectual verb with an infinitive complement. Again, we see a massive use of the verb hitchil
‘started’ and hechlit ‘decided’.
The verb hitchil is used to encoded the start event of an activity that is still ongoing in the
picture at hand, as in “hem hitchilu lechapes” “They started to-look” (started looking) with
respect to picture 9, or to describe an event that is known to be interrupted in the second
narrative, as in “hem hitchilu lesachek” “They started to play” with respect to the mice being
later interrupted by the hedgehog.
In addition we encounter the use of the aspectual verb yatsa ‘went out’ in a similar manner,
as in
“yatsa letayel bapark. . . ” “went out to walk in the park. . . ”
The verb hechelit ‘decide’ is used to encode intentions and plans, however we find it useful
for encoding aspect such as the ones denoted by the hitchil, e.g.“hu hechelit lakacaht et hakof
” “He decided to take the monkey” with respect to picture 29, or “hu hechelit lakacahat lo et
ha’ayin” “He decided to take his eye” to encode pulling out the monkey’s eye in the second
narrative.
Other interesting, less common, construction with an aspectual verb complemented by an
infinitive form were
“Acharey shehem hit’oreru hem himshichu lesachek”
“After they woke up they continued to play”
14 Hebrew has four different forms of nominalization: The infinitive, Gerunds, Verb-derived nominals (Vnom),
and Adjective-derived nominals (A-nom). I leave the question of nominals out of this discussion as it
is wide-open and demanding, and there was not enough use of them in my corpus to justify that. For further
details refer to (Berman, 1978)
69

to express the continuation of an ongoing activity, and
“hu lo hitsliach lehit’oshsesh”
“He did not manage-to recover”
to encode an unsuccessful outcome at the end of an ongoing process or a continuous state of
being. Also,
“hem hechelitu. . . lirot ma hem yecholim la’asot”
“They decided. . . to-see what they can-do”
is used to encode a canonical goal (note the shifting for present tense at the end of the clause).
The verb ‘to be’
The verb ‘to be’ in the past inflection was mostly used to encode states of being. An interesting
sequence of changes of state is encoded using various inflections of the verb ‘to be’ at the end
of the first narrative:
“hans nigsah lemocher habubot. . . hu adayin lo haya batuach sheze hakof shelo.
. . hu me’od ratas sheze yihiye. . . maher me’od zihah sheze hakof shelo,
lakach oto. . . vechazr lihiyot meushar achareysheharbe zman hu haya atsuv vehakof
haya chaser lo. . . ”
“Hans approach the dolls’ seller and. . . he was not yet sure that is his monkey. . . he
very much wanted that it will be. . . very quickly he recognized that this is his
monkey, took him. . . and returned-to-being happy after a long time that he was
sad and the monkey was missing to him”
These two subsequent phrases use no less then 6 inflections of the verb ‘to be’, in all possible
inflections (namely past haya, present ze, future yihiye and the infinitive lihiyot) to encode,
with the help of various adverbs, a sequence of states that starts somewhere in the past and
terminates in the future.
The sequence can be described roughly as follows: sad—missing monkey—not sure it’s his
monkey—it’s his monkey—happy. ‘Sad’ and ‘missing’ are in the past, ‘not sure’ in the shortterm
past and ‘happy’ is in the future. Note that the description of the states in the past
appears as the last clause, which is embedded into the general context as an adverbial clause
started with acharey she ‘after that’.
Lastly, we see here the use of the verb ‘to be’ in its present form as a ‘particle of being’. In
Hebrew hu, hi, hem, hen, the benoni forms of the verb to be, often occur as particles of being
as the noun of the sentence. This is a common phenomena in Hebrew, and it is demonstrated
in the following examples:
“hu lo stam dayag, hu mechin bubot vetsa’”
“He {is} not just a fisherman , He is a dolls and toys maker”
In connection to other Actionsarten, this use is closely related to states of being in a certain
location, occupation, etc. e.g. ‘be there’, ‘be a fisherman’.
70

Adverbial words and clauses
From all adult subjects this one used the most adverbs in my corpora. The set of adverbial
expressions was large and versatile, and some of them embedded other independent clauses.
In the first narrative he used 21 adverbial terms, 14 of which are relative clauses (characterized
by the use of the relative preposition she ‘that’), and in the second one he used 14, about
half of which are relative clauses.
Firstly, I will use the large sample of adverbs in demonstrate the use of where less common
adverbs in the corpus, but are fairly common in hebrew:
1. To locate an event ‘objectively’ along the time line e.g. be’avar ‘in the past’ as in “hans
kibel ba’aver kof matana layomuledet” “Hans received in the past a monkey {as a}
present for {his} birthday”.
2. To encode habits, using, e.g. kol hazman ‘all the time’ or tamid ‘always’. This is
conveniently used together with a habitual past inflection of the verb, as in “hu haya
shomer alav kol hazman”.
3. To pin down specific point along the time line e.g. yom echad ‘one day’, as in “yom
echad orev hivchin” “one day a magpie noticed”. This is commonly used in a story
telling context to focus attention towards a twist or a surprising event, mostly punctual
in time (points, achievements).
4. To encode the order in a sequence, e.g. kodem kol, davar rishon ‘first of all’, as in “davar
rishon hem karu lo et hazanav” “First thing they ripped off his tail”. This can be used
to encode subordinate goals in a plan that are executed in order, and thus representing
achievements or accomplishments.
5. To encode manner, e.g. le’at le’at ‘very slowly’ or maher me’od ‘very-quickly’, as in “le’at
le’at kar’u lo et hazanav” “Slowly slowly they ripped {off} his tail”. Here interestingly,
this is used to coerce the achievement verb ‘ripped’ into an activity which is ongoing.
These are useful means to ‘tell a story’, drawing attention to specific events in the course of
the story.
Relative clauses are even more useful, in story telling as well as spoken langauge, as they serve
to express temporal relations between events that are in the main and subordinate clause.
They express relations of type order (before, after) levels of simultaneity (at the same time)
or partial overlap (meanwhile), interruption (when), and time span (until).
Let us consider a few examples:
1. To encode order of events: lifney she ‘before that’, achery she ‘after that’ e.g.
“acharey shehakof nach, hu hechelit lehatsig oto”
“After the monkey rested, he decided to present him”
2. To encode simultaneity or partial overlap be’oto zman ‘at the same time’ toch kedey
‘while’
71

“toch kedey shehakof tsanach, higiu charakim muzarion”
“While the monkey parachuted, arrived weird bugs ”
Note the use of a verb in the scope of the ‘while’ clause, indicating ongoingness (that
would have been encoded using the past progressive in English).
3. To encode interruption kshe, ka’asher ‘when’
“kshehakipod nisa lehikanes, hem dachafu et hakof derch hachor”
“When the hedgehog tried to enter, they pushed the monkey through the
hole”
Note that in this construction, as opposed to the previous one, the matrix verb is most
likely to capture an event that is ongoing.
4. To encode time span, i.e. to mark boundaries of an event.
“hakof shaka shaka ad shehigia lakarka’it”
“The monkey sank sank until {it} got to the bottom”
. The use of such an adverb might hint at an activity as the matrix verb, and a
canonical goal in the verb of the embedded clause, indicating on an achievement or an
accomplishment.
Derivational morphology
With respect to derivational morphology, we encounter here similar phenomena to the previous
adults, e.g. use of the verbs in binyan HIFIL that encode achievements hitchil, higia,
hivchin ‘started, arrived, recognized’, and use of verbs in binyan HITPEL that encode an
ongoing activity hit’oshesh, hitchamem, hitbayesh ‘was getting warmer, was getting ashamed,
recovered’.
Verbs in binyan NIFAL are almost not used, however interestingly we see the use of the verb
nikra in two different meanings — once as a change of state hazanav nikra ‘the tail got ripped’,
and once as an adjective as having the property of being able to be ripped off kof shehu gam
achil vegam nikra ‘A monkey that is eatable and also “rippable” ’.
Lastly, we see in the description of the sad boy a couple of less common derivations of verbs
out from the root word ‘sad’, once in binyan NIFAL, i.e. ne’etsav that refers to getting sad as
a change of state, and the other one in binyan HITPAEL i.e. hit’atsev, that refers to getting
sad from the internal point of view of the process of getting sad.
Repetition
There was only one verb repetition in both of the narratives, to encode the drowning of the
monkey in the second narrative. The end of the encoded activity was clearly marked using
the adverbial term ad she ‘until’:
“hakof shaka shaka ad shehigia lakarka’it”
“The monkey sank sank until {it} got to the bottom”
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.
Reference Event in Selected
Picture question form 16
[[51]] dress monkey back hilbishu/dressed
[[51]] pull monkey’s eyes hitchila/hifsika lehotci/started/stopped to pull
[[51]] Fix monkey tiken/fixed
Table 5.13: HA29: Questions for investigating completion
Reference Event in selected
Picture question form 17
[[17]] dressing monkey hilbishu/dressed
[[26]] going on a trip yotsim letayel/going out for a walk
[[31]] pulling monkeys eye talash et eyno/pulled out his eye
[[31]] monkey is falling nafal la’agam/fell into the lake
[[41]] fixing monkey tafar et znavo/sewed his tail
Answers to questions
Table 5.14: HA29: Questions for investigating the progressive
Tables 5.13, 5.14 and 5.15 report data collected in the third component.
We can see here that the narrator favors verb phrases in the past tense, even in case of events
that are ongoing in the picture we refer to. The reason is that he anchored the story in the
past and thus all events are referred to as already happened in the past — the time the story
supposedly took place. 15 However we still see use of aspectual verbs like hitchil ‘started’,
yatsu ‘went’, when referring to ongoing events that were not completed, i.e. interrupted in
the context of the story.
Although it is slightly different from the results in the two previous analyses, this still shows
some difficulty Hebrew speakers have with describing events that were clearly not completed,
using a simple verb inflected in the past form.
15 You can refer to the transcript to find the supporting explanation he provided at my request.
73

Reference selected encoded
Picture form Aktionsart
[[8]] hit’atsev/was getting sad activity
[[11]] gareru.. letoch ahets/pulled into the tree accomplishment
[[14]] nikra/got ripped achivement
[[44]] hoshkiv oto lishon/put him to sleep accomplishment
Table 5.15: HA29: Questions for investigating Aktionsarten
74

Total Past Ambiguous Present Future
1 57(2) 50(2) 5 1 1
2 35(2) 32(2) 3 0 0
Table 5.16: HC7-Tenses: This table summarize the use of different grammatical tenses in the
two narratives (in brackets: the number of inflections complemented with the infinitive form)
5.4.4 HC7
Narratives
The narratives produced by this school-age girl were considerably shorter than the ones produced
by the adult subjects. All in all she used 57 verbs/verb phrases in the first narrative
and 35 in the second one. The report of the tense usage appears in table 5.16.
The girl anchored her stories strongly in the past (about 90% in both narrative, where most
of the other ones are ambiguous, and can are naturally interpreted as past) and she uses time
shifting within an embedded clause only once.
“ve’az hu tafar sheyihiye kmo echad chadash”
“And then he sewed {him} ‘in order that’ he will be like {a} new one”
This was used to encode purpose (note the use of the adverb kdey ‘in order to’), however the
event comes immediately after in the course of events of the story. In fact, she used only one
embedded clause in her narratives to encode relative tense:
“ve’az hakipod ra’a ma shehem asu”
“And then the hedgehog saw what they did”
This construction denotes that the event in the subordinate clause happened before the event
in the main clause. Other than that the order of the events she describes coincides with the
‘chronological’ course of the events in the story. In the second narrative there was no use of
embedded clauses whatsoever.
In the first narrative there is one alternation to present tense which is with respect to picture
43:
“ve’az hu meyabesh oto”
“And then he is drying it”
This alternation seems accidental, however it may be triggered by the ongoing nature of the
picture at hand.
In addition, she shows a fairly limited use of more complex constructions with aspectual verbs
with a complement verb in the infinitive form. There are two such constructions in each of
her narratives. The use she makes of the aspectual verbs, however, is similar to the one
demonstrated by the adult subjects to mark the beginning of an event that is ongoing, and
which is not completed. E.g.
“ve’az hitchil laredet geshem”“And then it started to rain” [[6]]
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Another, slightly awkward, construction was the following.
“hu ratsa lehavi oto lapark ki hem halchu hachutsa”
“He wanted to bring him to the park because they went out” [[6]]
This construction is awkward for several reasons. Firstly, the goal and the means seems to
replace one another (it would make more sense to think they went out because they wanted
to take him to the park), and also use of the cognitive verb seems redundant, because they
actually made it to the park. Lastly, it seem unnatural that the two related clauses refer
to different ‘sets’ of agents; the first refers to ‘him’ whereas the second refers to ‘them’. I
strongly believe that this construction is also an accident caused by a minor confusion in the
course of narrating a story online.
The morphological patterns (binyanim) used by the girl in the narratives are the common
derivations. The vast majority are of binyan PAAL, a few are of binyan HIFIL, generally
denoting an event of type achievement (hotsi, higia, hitchil ‘took out,arrived,started’, one
verb in binyan PIEL (sichek ‘played’) denoting an activity, one verb in binyan HITPAEL
(histakel ‘look about’), also denoting an activity, and one verb in binyan NIFAL (nichnas
‘enter’), denoting a change of state or achievement.
In general, her narrative uses a very clear pattern as for its temporal contour. She narrates
a sequence of events that almost entirely coincide with the chronological course of events in
the story, and she connects one clause to the next using veaz ‘and then’. This is a default
structure that works, and gives a fairly coherent and cohesive narrative. However the result
is somewhat dull and very much different from the one given by adults, and in particular it
lacks the variety of aspectual marking that was presented by them.
This ‘pattern-iteration’ may be explained in two different manners. One general explanation
is that at early school ages children may be tempted to stick to known patterns introduced
in stories they were exposed to in early classes, and a second possible explanation is that the
girl feel less confident to improvise in the language since she doesn’t necessarily use Hebrew
in the context of school — where she might have more opportunities to practice her linguistic
devices.
Answering the questions
Tables 5.17 and 5.18 report data collected in the third component. Generally, the answers
given to my questions were elaborated, included lots of redundancy, and generally looked
more like a mini-narrative and less suitable for the concrete classifications I was looking for.
However what we can see is that there is use of past even for incomplete, and present tense or
use of aspectual verbs to encode progressing. In the case of falling to the water, she chooses
to encode the cause ‘they made him fall’, rather than the actual falling, which again coincides
with the suggestion that it is less plausible to use past tense inflection to encode an event
that was already completed.
The answers to the questions about the pictures that were chosen to encode Aktionsart were
all far too elaborate, and it was hard to separate the event in question from other events
included in the context. The way the events were described, however, seemed to fit the
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Reference Event in selected
Picture question form 18
[[26]] going on a trip lakchu oto lesachek/took him to play
[[23]] pulling monkeys eye motsi lo ayin achat/pulling out of him one eye
[[31]] monkey is falling hepilu oto lamayim/the made him fall to the water
[[41]] fixing monkey tiken oto/fixed him
Table 5.17: HC7: Questions for investigating the progressive
Reference selected encoded
Picture form Aktionsart
[[8]] hu bacha/was crying activity
[[11]] heviu,histaclu,herichu /brought,looked-about,smelled activities
[[14]] hu asa im hashinayim/he did with the teeth activity
[[44]] asa shehu yihiye kmo kof cahdash/made him like a new monkey accomplishment
Table 5.18: HC7: Questions for investigating Aktionsarten
category of activities more then anything else, as they were (all but one) marked as ongoing
without evidence of a canonical goal.
5.4.5 HC4.5b
Tenses
The first narrative produced by this pre-school 4.5 years old girl was similar in its length to
the one produced by the school-age girl, and the second was about half as long, however it
significantly differs from the school-age girl narrative in terms of its temporal and aspectual
characteristic. Table 5.19 reports the use of tenses in both of her narratives.
We can see that there is no clear dominant tense in the narratives. In the first uses past
and present interchangeably while moving from one picture to another, and about 20% of the
verbs used are the various inflection of the verb ‘to-be’, indicating states, locations, or some
sort of description of the protagonist (usually the monkey). E.g.
“az hu haya kvar babayit” “Then he was already at home”
Total Past Ambiguous Present Future
1 52(7) 24 8 19(7) 1
2 15(3) 7 1 4(3) 3
Table 5.19: HC4.5b-Tenses: This table summarize the use of different grammatical tenses in
the two narratives (in brackets: the number of inflections complemented with the infinitive
form)
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“achshav harosh shelo hu po” “And now his head his here”
“acharey ze hem im mishehu acher” “After that they are with someone else”
In order to define the temporal relations between the events she uses the connectives acharey
ze ‘after that’, achshav ‘now’, ve’az ‘and then’. The adverb achshav ‘now’ is used in clauses
with present tense inflected verbs that describe states, emotions and intentions:
“achshav hu lo ro’e” “Now he does not see”
“achshav harosh shelo hu po” “And now his head his here”
“acharey achshav hu rotse le’echol otam” “Now he wants to eat them”
However the other two do not show a clear trend
“achcrey ze hu asa (mashmi’a kol)” “After that he did (makes sound)”
“achcrey ze hu ose weee. . . (mashmi’a kol)”“After that he does weee. . . (makes
sound)”
The use of embedded clauses and constructions with the infinitive is limited and is used
to mark intensions or purpose, generally with respect to pictures where the activity is still
ongoing, and where the underlying goal has not been achieved yet.
“achshav hu rotse leechol oto” “After that he wants to eat him”
“veacharey ze holchim lir’ot eifo hu” “After that {they} go to see where he is”
“veacharey ze hem rotsim shehu yetse” “After that they want that he will go out”
Last, there is a single interesting use of the adverb kvar ‘already’, that stresses completion of
a previous event, to contrast the arrival home with the previous falling of the monkey.
“az hu halach habyta. . . hu nafal. . . az hu haya kvar babayit”
“Then he went home. . . he fell. . . then he was already at home”
In the second narrative we encounter similar phenomena, namely switching back and forth
between past and present, using ‘and then’ and ‘after that’ interchangeably, and using modal
verb constructions to mark intentions. One apparent difference is the use of future tense in
the course of events, that was discussed in the previous chapter and is probably connected
with the underlying folded goal/plan structure.
In both of the narratives, the girl doesn’t show command of the different morphological
patterns that are used to derive verbs and at least twice uses a verb in a wrong binyan (i.e. a
non-valid derivation). This may be because she is still quite young and not sensitive to this
kind of subtlety or because she is tri-lingual and thus a little confused with respect to specific
features of a particular language.
In addition, she uses a lot of repetitions, (e.g. she repeats the verb nishbar ‘broke’ 7 times in
two consecutive sentences) but it seems that they are more a result of hesitation or a wish to
‘fill up the silence’ then means to achieve some purpose.
Generally, the girl shows command of the use of different tenses and even more complex constructions
within individual sentences, however overall her narrative is more of a descriptive
overview of the pictures chained to one another using some temporal words, without real evidence
of encoding more complex temporal relations such as simultaneity, anteriority, relative
tense, and aspectual contour of the event at hand.
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Total Past Ambiguous Present Future
1 25 20 4 1 0
Table 5.20: HC4.5-Tenses: This table summarize the use of different grammatical tenses in
the two narratives (in brackets: the number of inflections complemented with the infinitive
form
Answers to questions
Here again, the data collected in the third component seems less relevant to the analysis.
Her answers to my open questions were stories in a nutshell, that again used past, present
and some connectives in a fairly random manner, making it hard to isolate the event at hand
from other surrounding events that have been already started or completed. For example, in
response to the question “what did the bird do to the monkey”:
“hu. . . chazak..ose kacha ve’acharey ze kacha ve’acahrey ze nafal lamayim”
“He {is}. . . strong. . . doing that after that and after that fell to the water”
When I asked specific closed questions with several possible answers she was not entirely
sensitive to the distinction between the several answers, and sometimes the chosen options
were inconsistent with one another.
5.4.6 HC4.5
As mentioned before this girl had the shortest attention span for this experiment, she agreed
to only one narrative, which was significantly shorter then all other texts in my corpora. The
text however was coherent and beautiful structured, especially given her young age.
First of all, like all our adults subjects, she anchored her narrative in the past. Table 5.20
shows a summary of the tenses used by her.
First she opens the story with one condensed sentence that contains all the required setting
information:
“api vehayeled ve’ima shelo halchu leha’achil et habrvazim”
“Api and the boy and his mother went to feed the ducks”
The aspectual verb construction she uses helps establish the beginning of an ongoing activity,
which most likely will be interrupted.
Later, she orders the events in a logical order and rarely uses the connectives acharey ze,
achar kach ‘after that, afterwards’. This is a good sign as she seem to understand that the
default narrated order already indicates the temporal order and she only uses the connectives
as means to distinguish different scenes, or to introduce new characters. E.g.
“acahrey ze hadayag ratsa litpos dag”
“after that the fisherman wanted to catch a fish”
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In addition she uses rhetorical methods, and almost presents the story to an imaginary audience.
“ve’et mi hu tafas? hu tafas et api!”
“And who did he catch? he caught api!”
And the only shift to present tense is used to answer one of her rhetorical questions
“sam oto bacahnut. atem yodim eifo api?. . . hine!”
“And put him and the store. Do you know where api is?. . . here!”
However although she presents a coherent structured narrative, it is hard to identify aspectual
distinctions between events. All events (except for the first scene) are located in the past and
are told in a retrospective view (i.e. taken to be completed), and there is not much use of
aspectual verbs or adverbs to provide indication of the internal temporal characteristic (e.g.
is it an ongoing event? was it interrupted or completed?).
This may indicate that acquisition of aspect markers comes at a later phase for Hebrew
speaking children. It may be that children first become proficient in use of tenses and learn
to use grammatical constructions that are in the language (modal verb + complements,
connectives, etc) and use them to order events and structure a coherent narrative, however
that lexical means to mark aspect are not obligatory in the language, and anyway are not
necessary to convey the general message, and thus may be acquired at a latter stage.
5.5 Results
In the beginning of this chapter I presented the following set of questions:
1. What linguistic forms are used by mature Hebrew speakers to mark aspect in verb
phrases?
2. Can we relate these linguistic forms to the various Aktionsarten we have studied?
3. How do Hebrew speaking children acquire and use those linguistic forms to mark aspect
in the langauge?
In the next section I summarize my findings with respect to each of these questions.
In answering the first question, I will mostly refer to the analysis of the adult narratives in my
corpora, as my goal is to understand how aspectual marking actually works in the language.
Later on, I use these results as a base line for discussing the other two components of this
summary.
Using different linguistic forms to mark temporal aspect in the language
As previously mentioned, Hebrew provides a very limited set of grammatical means to mark
temporal notions in the langauge. That is, there are five grammatical inflections that mark
tense and mood. I will describe briefly how the use of these tenses was reflected in the
narratives.
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1. Past tense — This form is used to describe events that occur prior to the time of
speaking, irrespective of their aspectual characteristics. This form is typically used in
all kind of narratives in Hebrew, including story-telling. Most of the subjects used the
past form to anchor their stories in the past, in both of their narratives.
However, it seems that using the simple past form inflection in a verb phrase has a
default meaning of ‘completion’. Thus mature speakers use more complex constructions
with aspectual verbs or relative clauses when they have to describe an event that is
clearly ongoing, or alternatively has not been completed or is interrupted. To do this,
they use verb constructions like Hitchilu lesachek ‘started to play’ instead of sichaku
‘played’ when they describe the park scene. A more elaborated discussion of these
devices will follow.
2. Present tense — The present tense form is referred to as benoni 19 form (literally
‘intermediate’) and is used to describe events that are neither in the past nor in the
future. These can be events that take place at the time of speaking, general facts,
habits, etc. Similarly to the past tense, it is typically used in any kind of narratives
including story-telling, however there is no grammatical aspect associated to it.
None of the experiment subjects has chosen to anchor his or her stories in the present
although it is a suitable option (in (A. and Slobin, 1994) half of the adults chose this
option). However, they all incorporate present tense forms in their story deliberately
to serve some purposes:
(a) To set background information, mainly connected with states of the protagonists
and physical settings, E.g. “hayeled lavush vehakol muchan” “The child is dressed
and everything is ready”HA27
(b) To express simultaneity (A more elaborate discussion will follow in connection with
time shifting)
(c) To inflect cognitive verbs that mark intentions e.g. “hu rotse lakachat oto” “He
wants to take him”HA24
(d) In quotation of the protagonists e.g. “chaval hu tofes harbe makom” “To bad he
takes a lot of space”HA29
Actual inflection of finite verbs in the present form, however, seem to carry a default
meaning as progressive. Many answers to questions in the form of “What happened
in picture X?” that referred to events that were ongoing were given an answer in the
present form although the question was asked in the past (see HA27 transcript). In
addition, when expressing simultaneity, generally the event that is ongoing and being
interupted/overlapped takes the form of the progressive, e.g. “hem rau. . . anan magia”
“They saw a cloud is arriving”
3. Future tense — This form is used to describe events that are (potentially) located
beyond the point of speech. In addition, they are used in expressions of conditionals,
irrealis, and intentions. The adults made only marginal use of these forms, mostly in
19 It differs grammatically from other forms in the sense that it is not inflected for person, just gender and
number.
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quotes of the protagonists, or in relative clauses that encode intentions and plans to be
realized beyond the point of speech.
4. The imperative — Imperative form is used mostly in direct speech and thus not used
a lot in the narratives in my corpus. The few uses of the imperative form in the narrative
all occur when quoting a protagonist addressing another protagonist.
5. The infinitive — The infinitive is a common nonfinite verb form in the langauge, its
inherent meaning corresponds closely to the form to+verb in English, and it is used to
complement modal verbs (can, must) cognitive verbs (think, decide) and aspectual verbs
(start, continue). The first verb can be inflected in the past, present or future.
There was massive use of such constructions in the narratives in my corpus: roughly
10% of the verb phrases in each of the adult narratives. These constructions were used
to serve two main purposes:
(a) To indicate the beginning or continuation of an event that is still ongoing or is
known to be interrupted, e.g. “hem hitchilu leha’achil et habarvazim” “They started
to feed the ducks”HA27:[[3]]
(b) To mark intentions and purposes and, where used many times, for describing events
that are actually ongoing in the picture at hand. This phenomenon was demonstrated
in the first component of the experiment, when describing an ongoing event
in the course of event of the story, e.g. “hem hechelitu lakachat oto itam letiyul”
“They decided to take him with them for a walk” HA24:[[26]].
In both of these cases they are used redundantly with respect to the tense form of the
verb. It seems that marking it is helpful to encode duration of an event by marking a
clear starting point or encapsulating it in a ‘mini-plan’ expressed by a modal/cognitive
verb and an infinitive complement.
In order to express relative time, Hebrew speaker can use time shifting in embedded clauses to
encode notions of simultaneity, anteriority and prospection. Consequently, this grammatical
construction also brings about the aspectual nature of one (or more) of the verbs. For example,
using the past in the matrix verb and present in the embedded clause encodes simultaneity.
E.g. “vera’a et kol ha’achbarim shehem nitpalim elav” “And saw all the mice that they are
picking on him”. Such constructions denote the ongoingness of the verb in the clause.
In addition to the grammatical tenses there are additional lexical devices that Hebrew speakers
can use to encode temporal aspect. Here is a summary review of the ways I have found they
have been used in the narratives:
1. Aspectual verbs — By the term ‘aspectual verbs’ I refer to the verbs that refer to
phases of some “process”, hitchil, hifsik, himshich ‘start, stop, continue’, and verbs that
denote directed actions yatsa, halach ‘went out, walked’. These can be used with an
infinitive complement as described in the previous paragraph to give additional aspectual
contour to the event at hand. Below some typical examples:
(a) “Gareru oto letoch ha’ets, vehitchilu lefarek oto” “Dragged him into the tree and
started to disassemble him”HA29:[[13]].
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In this example the aspectual verb denotes the beginning of an ongoing activity
that is located in the past.
(b) “et hakof matsu mishpacaht chuldot. . . vehaima vehayeled mamshichim lechapes”
“The monkey — they found — a family of rats. . . and the mother and the child
continue to look”.
In this example the aspectual verb is used to denote the ‘ongoingness’ of an event
that is simultaneous with another event that occurred in the past.
(c) “Yom echad yatsa hans letayel” “One day went hans to walk” HA29[second narrative]
In this example the aspectual verb denotes the start event of an activity that was
ongoing however was interrupted in the course of an event of the story.
2. The verb ‘to be’ - The verb ‘to be’ in Hebrew can be used to denote states in the same
way it does in English, however it is used in a slightly different manner in its present
form, and has some additional roles in the language.
(a) States — The use of the verb ‘to be’ in the past tense appeared occasionally in
the narratives of the adults, to describe states of the protagonists. For example,
“miki haya atsuv meod” “Miki was very sad” HA24:[[8]]
(b) Nominal sentences — For sentences of the type ‘noun+be+adjective’ in the
present, Hebrew omits the verb ‘to be’, which yields the concept of nominal (i.e.
‘verbless’) sentences. These sort of sentences were almost never used by the adult
narrators, as they anchored their story in the past.
(c) Particles of being — A common use of the present inflections of the verb ‘to
be’ hu, hi, hem, hen ‘he,she,they[M],they[F]’, widely used as nouns to refer to
the different protagonists in the story, e.g. hemhigiu lapark “They arrived to the
park”
(d) Habitual past — Lastly, a less common use of the verb ‘to be’ is in the construction
of what is known as compound or habitual past. This construction uses the
verb ‘to be’ inflected in the past with a complement verb in the infinitive form to
describe old habits, in the sense of ‘used to’ in English. One of the adult narratives
made extended use of this form to set the background information for the story.
For example, “lekol makom shehu haya holech hu haya lokeach et hakof ito” “To
every place he was going {wherever he used to go} he was taking {he used to take}
the monkey with him”.
3. Adverbial words and clauses — Adverbial words were used to serve several purposes
in the adult narratives:
(a) To locate events in time be’avar ‘in the past. . . ’
(b) To indicate order davar rishon ‘firstly. . . ’, achar kach ‘after that. . . ’
(c) To indicate manner maher/leat ‘quickly/slowly’
(d) To focus attention to a certain point of time pitom ‘suddenly’
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Note that the last two categories might sometimes contribute aspectual information:
‘slowly’ can hint on the ongoing ness of an activity, e.g. “leat leat karu lo et hazanav”
“Slowly slowly they tore his tail” presents tearing his tail as an activity, while ‘suddenly’
is more punctual in time, and usually followed by accomplishments.
Adverbial clauses are used to encode order between events and can also sometime reflect
their aspectual nature. Examples:
(a) achacrey she ‘after that’: “achacrey shehitchil geshem. . . hkof hitofef ” “after
{that} rain started. . . the monkey flew off the bicycle”
(b) kshe ‘when’: “kshehu higia habayta. . . hu meod hitatsev” “When he got home he
got sad”. In this construction the event in the embedded clause coincides with the
one beginning of the event described by the main verb, and is generally punctual
in time.
(c) ad she ‘until’: “shama nishar hakof ad sheala bechakato shel dayag” “There stayed
the monkey, until he was caught in a fisherman’s hook”. In this construction the
embedded clause marks the end of the event described in the main verb.
4. Derivational morphology (‘binyanim’)
As we already discussed in chapter 3, Hebrew has a rich morphology and an interesting
set of (seven) base patterns that are used to derive verbs from the roots. The patterns
are not fully productive in the sense they cannot be applied across all the lexicon of
verbs, and most of the roots have one or more typical conjugations.
However, the binyanim have some inherent meaning that sometimes might contribute
to the aspectual characteristic of the event at hand. The use of different verb patterns
and sometimes using derivations that are not so common (e.g. hitofef ‘flew around’ as
opposed to af ‘flew’, ne’etsav ‘got-sad’ as opposed to haya atsuv ‘was sad’, etc).
The list below summarizes the main trends I have recognized with respect to the inherent
meaning of the various forms, however it is important to bear in mind that (i) These are
not rules, but interesting phenomena, there might well be exceptions or parallel other
phenomena (ii) Most of these findings refer to past inflections in those binyanim, and
the rough classification I provide may not apply to other inflections.
(a) PAAL — This is the most common pattern, and it is used to express almost any
type of event, however the default meaning is of a completed one. E.g. nafal, lakach
‘fell,took’
(b) PIEL — The heavy conjugation PIEL is commonly used for verbs that denote
a transitive activity (doing something to somebody/something): chimem, ybesh
‘warmed-up, dried-up’
(c) HIFIL — The conjugation HIFIL is mostly used to denote ‘causing something to
someone/something’ and thus is intimately connected with a change of state or a
canonical goal and thus appropriate to denote achievements and accomplishments:
higia, hipil, hilbish ‘arrived, made fall, dress up’.
(d) NIFAL — The NIFAL conjugation is the passive counterpart of the verb paal, in
a slightly different sense then in English, since it can encapsulate the actual change
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of state as in the following examples: nikra, nishbar ‘got ripped, got broken’.
(e) HITPAEL — The HITPAEL conjugation, the intermediate counterpart of PIEL,
is strongly connected with ongoing activities, that are not necessarily directed
towards some canonical goal: hitofef, histakel ‘flew around,look about’
All of these examples and much more that support the same trends widely occurred
across all adult narratives. There was only marginal use (if any) of the patterns HUFAL,
and PUAL.
5. Repetitions – The last device that was used in the adult narratives to denote ongoing
or iterative nature of an activity is the use of repetition, e.g. “Hem halchu halchu
halchu. . . ” “they walked walked walked”HA27:[[27]]
Relating linguistic forms to Aktionsarten
After reviewing the various linguistic forms that are available to Hebrew speakers to mark
aspect in the language, we are ready to relate them to the various Aktionsarten we have
discussed as they appeared in the narratives and in the answers to the questions.
1. Points — There was no evidence of use of any verb/verb phrases that denoted points
in my corpus.
2. States — A clear indication of a state is the inflection of the verb ‘to be’ in the past
(“hu haya meod atsuv” “He was very sad”) or use of the present inflection as a particle
of being with no additional verb (this occurs mainly in the children’s narratives) e.g.
“veachshav hu po” “And now he is here”HC4.5b
3. Activities — Activities are characterized by their ongoing nature and lack of a canonical
goal. As such, we saw that the HITPAEL conjugation is appropriate to describe
activities. The use of binyan PIEL, if there is no canonical goal in the sentence (e.g
an object) also suits to indicate activities e.g. sichek. However, almost every verb in
the infinitive form that is accompanied by the aspectual verb hitchil ‘started to’, in an
adverbial clause that marks the duration of the activity toch kedey she ‘while’, or with
a subordinate clause that marks boundaries for the event ad she, might indicate that
the verb at hand describes an event of type activity.
4. Achievement — Achievements are characterized by a change of state and/or a canonical
goal. A conjugation that was widely used in such context in the narratives was
binyan HIFUIL e.g. higia,hitchil ‘arrived, started’. In addition, when using embedded
clauses to encode notions of simultaneity using the connective kshe ‘when’, the verb in
the clause is of type achievement e.g. “kshehu higia habayta. . . hu meod hitatsev” “when
he arrived home he got really sad”. Other adverbial words that may indicate that the
matrix verb is an achievement are pitom ‘suddenly’ and kvar ‘already’.
5. Accomplishments — We stated before that binyan PIEL is used to encode a transitive
activity. Thus, when accompanied by an object (the object is either being ‘changed’ or
represents the canonical goal) it is well suited to represent an accomplishment e.g. tiken
oto, yibesh oto ‘fixed him, dried him’.
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Note that these are not the only marker linguistic forms that can be used for any of the
categories, just the ones that I found had been used to a large extent in the adult narratives.
In addition there is a lot of room for coercion by plugging in adverbs (for example, adding
substantial information about duration of an event may denote an ongoing activity or coerce
an achievement to accomplishment), shifting tense in a relative clause (shifting to present
reflects the ongoing steady nature of the event and thus may coerce a verb to state or activity),
and so on.
Development of linguistic forms to mark temporal aspect in the language
The narratives provided by the children were significantly different from the ones provided
by the adults. Generally speaking, the devices used to encode time were limited and fairly
simple compared to the large versatile set of forms used by the adults. In the list below I
briefly review some hints on the development of such linguistic forms by Hebrew speaking
children.
1. Tenses — All children I interviewed had already mastered the use of tenses in independent
clauses. In addition, all of them had learnt how to use aspectual/modal/cognitive
verbs complemented by the infinitive form, and use them correctly in the construction of
a sentence. When constructing a sequential narrative they almost never shifted to other
tenses. The younger girl used past and present interchangeably, without any purpose,
and the older used the past tense consistently with almost no shifting.
2. Aspectual verbs — All children I interviewed had already mastered the use of aspectual
and modal verbs complemented by the infinitive form, and they used them in
the same ways adults did to indicate the start event of an activity or a mini-plan that
encapsulated the ongoing activity. For example, “achshv hu rotse le’echol oto” “And
now he want to eat him”HC4.5b:[[2]], “veaz hitchil laredet geshem” “And then it started
to rain”HC7:[[6]]
3. The verb ‘to be’ — The younger children used more clauses constructed on top of the
verb ‘to be’ in the past, or nominal sentences that denote states. One of the youngest
children used such clauses in 20% of her sentences in one of her narratives. The school
age girl however didn’t use as much state description, and used mostly inflections of
finite verbs.
4. Adverbial words and clauses — This was the most evident difference between the
children’s and adult narratives. All the children’s narratives in my sample used simple
sentences, and hardly used adverbial words or clauses to mark internal temporal
characteristic of events and interrelations like simultaneity. Even the school age girl
avoided using long and complicated sentences and built her narrative sequentially using
the connective veaz ‘and then’. It is worth mentioning however, that the few times an
embedded clause was used it was constructed and used correctly “veaz hakipod raa ma
shehem asu” “and the hedgehog saw what they did”.
Other adverbial expressions that were randomly used by the children were pitom ‘suddenly’
kvar ‘already’.
5. Derivational morphology (‘binyanim’) — Here I there was no significant difference
86

in the derivational forms used by the adults and by the children however it is not
surprising since most of the verbs have typical conjugations that are commonly used,
and carry the inherent meaning we have discussed. What we do not see here is use of a
slightly different conjugation from the default one to capture aspectual subtleties. We
do see one invalid conjugation kare instead of nikra for ‘got ripped’.
6. Repetitions — If there was any repetition in the children’s narrative, it was not deliberate,
but a sense of hesitation or confusion, or an attempt to ‘earn some time’ before
the next clause.
In sum, it seems that while the Hebrew speaking children master the various inflection of
verbs and construction of simple sentences in the three tenses fairly early, they do not use
more advanced linguistic forms (relative clauses, tense shifting, variety of conjugation) to
encode aspectual information. Both the school girl and the pre-school girl that presented a
coherent and cohesive narrative did so using only past tense without much evidence of the
internal temporal characteristics of the events or interrelation/overlap between them.
There are two possible explanations for this phenomena. One is that, since aspect markers
in Hebrew is not grammatical and in any case not obligatory, their acquisition comes in a
latter phase. The other is that since the children I interviewed are all bi- or tri-lingual, they
are doomed to master the specific languages more slowly then children that master only one
language. In the following conclusive remarks I will include some suggestions for further
research that can help to decide between these two hypotheses.
87

Chapter 6
Conclusive Remarks
In this study we have explored the development and use of linguistic forms in the temporal
domain.
We have started by defining the notion of event, and our conscious experience of time as a
construction on top of this. We understand that the task of producing language forces one
to make choices about the events described and the way to describe them (filtering), order
events, and pack them together in a constructed coherent structure. Lastly, we explained
that children need to acquire the relevant linguistic forms to talk about time, and that this
is a bidirectional cognitive–linguistic process.
We have continued by focusing our discussion on specific questions: (1) To what extent
children use goal/plan knowledge to structure their narrative, (2) what linguistic forms are
available in Hebrew to mark temporal aspect, (3) how these can be related to the well know
Aktionsarten and (4) how do children acquire these forms and use them.
In Chapter 4 we have shown some evidence for increasing use (by age) of planning knowledge
in filtering and packaging the narrative, by means of representing the causal networks of
several protagonists, checking which of them were included in the narratives, and how they
were interrelated.
In chapter 5 we have identified some commonly used devices to encode notions of relative
tense, simultaneity, ongoingness, and completion, all of which are voluntary. We have related
them to the various Aktionsarten, and tried to see to what extent children use them.
It turned out in my analysis that the adults demonstrated use of a large versatile set of linguistic
devices to mark aspect, while children show little to no evidence of adding substantial
information about the temporal aspect of events, beyond grammatically locating them in
time.
It is important to stress however that the data presented here does not provide any statistical
evidence of the phenomena, only supporting evidence on a small scale. One shouldn’t try to
derive any rules from the results of my analysis.
Clearly, only by a more comprehensive research using a bigger set of subjects, divided into
groups of ages between 3 and 9 (maybe even older), preferably native Hebrew speakers, would
88

we be able to get results that are statistically valid.
The best way to look at this work, as I see it, is as an inspiration for further research. In the
list below I include some ideas that I think worth while investigating.
One path to be explored, with respect to linguistic forms in modern Hebrew, is investigation
of the inherent lexical meaning of different verb pattern in different tenses. This meaning
has clearly some relation to aspectual notions and various Actionsarten. Another possible
investigation is to find out if and how the verb phrases that denote intention (try,want,decide)
serve in the role of aspectual verbs.
Under a more general view of the development of linguistic forms, it would be interesting to
find out roughly when children start to consistently add voluntary aspectual information, and
to compare and contrast this with other languages in which the aspect is grmmaticalized and
obligatory (e.g. slavic languages).
Conversely, it could be interesting to look at how this lack of grammaticalized aspect and
relative tense affects, or even ‘gets in the way’ of Hebrew speakers in acquiring a second language
(L2). One possibility is to look at languages that grammaticalizes notions of completion
and progression (e.g. Czech). Another possibility is to see how do they cope with learning
languages that do not allow time shifting in the scope of a sentence (e.g. Dutch).
It is important to note that I have not conducted comprehensive research into what has
already been done in this field, and some of these ideas may have been suggested or be
already investigated. However, these ideas are only the tip of the iceberg.
I believe there are much more paths to explore here, either in a general language acquisition
domain WE ARE HERE or specifically regarding development of Tense/Aspect marking in
hebrew, Particularly since Hebrew has had comparatively very little investigation relative to
English and other European languages on such matters.
89

Appendix A
Transcripts
90

A.1 HC4.5b
Telling the story
Tir’I, hem halchu lepo [matsbi’a al hapark]
Look, they went to here [pointing on the park]
Eifo ze po?
Where is {it} here?
Hem rotsim le’echol ochel mishelahem. . . [matsbi’a al al ha’avazim]
They want to eat food of their . . . [pointing on the gooses]
(bo’i nesachek she’ani hayalda ve’at hagdola, ani achshav holechet lishon ve’at
mesaperet li sipur, at muchana?)
(Let’s play {a game} that I am the girl and you are the big {old} girl, I am now
going to sleep and you are telling me a story, are you ready 1 are you willing to?)
ken.
yes.
[[2]] po hem holchim, po hem. . .
[[2]] Here they are walking, here they. . .
[[3]] hem rotsim le’echol ochel, vehu rotse le’echol oto,
[[3]] They want to eat food, and he wants to eat him,
[[5]] Ve’acharey ze hem halchu habayta. . .
[[5]] And after that they went home. . .
[[6]] Acharey ze hu nafal. . . [matsbi’a al hakof]
[[6]] After that he fell. . . [pointing on the monkey]
(R:im ani ertse lishmo’a et ze shuv achar kach ani lo uchal lir’ot al mi at
matsbi’a, az tagidi al mi at matsbi’a)
(R:If I will want to hear it again afterwards I will not be able to see on me you
are ponting, so tell me on who you are pointing)
Ve’az hu nafal,
And then he fell,
Ve’az hu halach habayta,
And then he went home,
[[7]] Lo. . . az hu halach habayta. . .
1 also translated
91

[[7]] No. . . then he went home. . .
[[8]] Lo, az hu halach habayta. . . hu nafal
[[8]] No, then he went home. . . he fell
Az hu haya kvar babayit
Then he was already 2 at home,
Lo, az hu haya kvar babayit
No, then he was already 3 at home,
Acharey ze hu bacah,
After that he cried,
[[9]] ve’acharey ze holchim lir’ot eifo hu,
[[9]] And after that {they} are going to see where he {is},
[[10]] Acharey ze. . . hu. . . After that. . . .he. . . Hu ba “tree” (ets)
[[10]] He is in the “tree” 4
[[11]] Achshav hu ba’ets im ha“mouse” (achbar)
[[11]] Now he is in the tree with the “mouse” 5
(R: im ha’achbarim. . . )
(R:with the mice. . . ) 6
[[13]] Ve’ha’achbarim rotsim lekare’a (likro’a) oto
And the mice want to rip 7 him
(R: nachon)
(R:right)
[[14]] lo tir’i. . . az eifo harosh shelo?
[[14]] No look. . . then where is his head?
Nishbar, nishbar [shinuy baintonetsya]
Broke, broke 8 [changes intonation]
Ve’acharey ze. . . acharey ze hu nishbar
2
completeion
3
completeion
4
use of english word
5
English
6
translation to Hebrew
7
wrong verb pattern
8
note the pattern niphal
92

And after that. . . after that he broke 9
[[15]] acharey ze hu nishbar, nishbar [overet al hatmunot]
[[15]] After that he broke, broke [iterating over the pictures]
(R: rega, ma kara po?)
(R: {Just a} moment, what happened here?)
Acharey ze hu nishbar
After that he broke
Acharey ze ze nishbar
After that it broke
[[19]] Acharey ze hem rotsim shehu yetse
[[19]] After that they want him to exit
Veze hu lo ohev,
And that he {does} not like,
Ve’achshav hu lo ro’e
And now he does not see
Ve’achshav harosh shelo hu po [matsbi’a al hapetach hachasum]
And now his head is 10 here [pointing on the blocked entree]
[[18]] achashav hu [matsbi’a al hakipod] rotse le’echol otam [matsbi’a al ha’achbarim]
[[18]] Now he [pointing on the hedgehog] wants to eat them [pointing on the mice]
(R: nachon)
(R: right)
[[20]] Aval hu yoter gadol mimeno. . .
[[20]] But he is bigger then him. . .
(R: nachon)
(R: right)
Tir’i
Look
(R: az ma hu asa lo?)
(R: So what did he do to him?)
[[24]] Achshav hu holech lishon itam, et ze hu ohev
9 niphal
10 here is=hu
93

[[24]] Now he is going 11 to sleep with them, {AT} that he loves. . .
[[25]] Acharey ze hem im mishehu acher
[[25]] After that they are with someone else
[choshevet. . . ]
[thinking. . . ]
[[28]] Ve’acharey ze. Acharey ze hu [matsbi’a al hatsipor] ba,
[[28]] And after that, after that he [pointing on the bird] is coming,
[[29]] Velo yesh. . . hu [matsbi’a al hatsipor] yesh oto [matsbi’a al hakof]
[[29]] And he has. . . he [pointing the bird] has 12 him.
[choshevet. . . ]
[thinking. . . ]
[[32]] Ve’acharey ze, emm, acharey ze hub a“nest” (ken) vehu machzik oto
[[32]] And after that, emm, after that he {is} in the nest* (nest) and he is holding him
[[32]] Ve’acharey ze hu asa ....[osa tnu’ot shel meshicha].
[[32]] And after that he did... [making motions of pulling]
[[33]] Ve’acharey ze hu asa weee....[osa kol shel nefila] al ha“bees” 13 (dvorim).
[[33]] And after that he did weee... [making sounds of falling] on the “bees” (bees)
[[34]] Vekacha hu kare’a (?)
[[34]] And like this he is (?) 14 Az ehh... So ehh...
[[35]] Acharey ze hu [matsbi’a al hadag hagadol] rotes le’echol oto [matsbi’a al hakof]...
[[35]] After that he [pointing on the big fish] wants to eat him [pointing on the monkey]
[[38]] Acharey ze hu [hadayag] lokeach oto,
[[38]] After that he [the fisherman] is taking him,
Hu yachol lesader oto,
He can fix 15 him,
[[39]] Ve’acharey ze hub a lesham
[[39]] And after that he is coming {TO} there
[[40]] Ve lesham
11
literally
12
not exactly translation of yesh
13
English
14
not understandable
15
literally - can to fix
94

[[40]] And {TO} there
[[42]] Ve’acharey ze, ro’a, hu shotef oto
[[42]] And after that, {you} see, he is washing him
[[43]] acharey ze hu mesader oto
[[43]] after that he is fixing him
[[45]] acharey ze hu po [matsbi’a al hazebra]
[[45]] after that he {is} here [pointing on the zebra]
[[47]] acharey ze hayeled ba, po ve...
[[47]] after that the kid is coming, here and...
[[50]] acharey ze hu mekabel oto...ro’a?
[[50]] after that he is getting him...you see?
(R: ma kara po?)
(R: what happened here?)
[[50]] hu mekabel oto.
he is getting him.
[[51]]: Retelling the story
Hem halchu,
They walked,
Ha“duck”. . . (emm, eich kor’im leze?)
The duck*. . . (emm, how do {they} call it?)
(R:habarvazim?)
(R:The ducks 16 ?)
Habarvazim rotsim lir’ot, hem halchu lesham,
The ducks want to see 17 , They went there,
Acharey ze echad habarvazim mehabarvazim rotse le’echol oto
After that one ducks 18 , of the ducks want to eat him
Az hem, az hem halchu ahbayta venafal baderech,
So they, so they went home and {it} fell on the way,
16 transltion to Hebrew
17 probably want to see the ducks - awkward in both languages
18 make sense in Hebrew
95

Ve’acarey ze. . . misheu yikach oto
And after that. . . someone will take him
Ve’acarey ze,ve’acharey ze od misheu yikach oto,
And after that, and after that another one will take him,
acharey ze od misheu yikach oto,
after that another one will take him,
acharey ze od misheu yikach oto,
after that another one will take him,
Ve’acharey ze, hu halach lamayim,
And after that, he went to the water,
Ve’acharey ze, ba ha*fish* hagadol hu rotse le’echol oto
And after that, came the big *fish* he wants to eat him
Ve’az ish echad kaze shehu mesader et ze
And then one man like that, that he is fixing it
Ve’acharey ze hu ba [matsbi’a al hayeled]
And after that he came/is coming 19 [pointing on the boy]
Ve’acharey ze haya lo. . .
And after that he had. . .
Ve’acharey ze hu ratsa et ze [matsbi’a al hakof]
And after that he wanted that [pointing on the monkey]
Answering questions
[[51]] at zocheret mi lakach oto?
do you remember who took him?
Lo No Rak echad ani yoda’at
Only one I know
Ze. . . chaki. . . *bird* (tsipor)
It {is}. . . wait. . . *bird*
tsipor?
bird?
19 ambiguous
96

Ken, tsipor, rak ze ani yoda’at.
Yes, bird, only that I know.
ve’at zocheret ma hatsipor asta lo? Ma hatsipor asta lakof?
and do you remember what did the bird do to him? What did the bird do to the
monkey?
Hu. . . chazak. . . ose kacha ve’acharey ze kacha ve’acharey ze nafal lamyim.
He. . . strong. . . is doing like this and after that like that and after that fell into the water.
Ve’acharey ze echad, em. . . *fish*, acharey ze dag echad ratsa le’echol oto, ve’acharey ze is
echad yachol. . . kacha shehu yachol lesader, acharey ze hu yikakach oto ve’acharey ze hu ya’ase
et ze.
And after that, one, em, *fish*, after that one fish wanted to eat him, and after that {a} man
can. . . like that he can fix him, after that he will take him and after that he will do it.
At zocheret shehayu achbarim basipur?
Do you remember that {there} were mice in the story?
Ken
Yes
ma ha’achbarim asu lakof?
what did the mice do to the monkey?
Ha’achbarim asu lakof kacha ah. . . [madgima meshichot] hem rotsim lishbor oto
The mice did to the monkey like that ah. . . [demonstrating pulling] they want to break him
Acharey ze hem asu tsh tsh. . . [madgima dchifot]
After that they did tsh tsh. . . [demonstrating pushing]
Acharey ze hu nitsa (yatsa)
After that he exited 20
Ve’acharey ze hatusik yikara
And after that the bottom will get ripped
Ve’acharey ze yihiye lo chorim biglal echad shehaya im kacha alav [madgima kotsim]
And after that he will have holes because of one that was with like that [demonstrating
KOTSIM]
kipodim?
hedgehogs?
Yes
20 wrong pattern
97

Ken
Ve’az hu kibel chorim mehakipodim.
And then he got holes from the hedgehogs
ma ha’ish asa lakof?
what did the man do to the monkey?
Hu sider oto
He fixed it
Acharey ze hu yikach et ze [matsbi’a al hayeled]
After that he will take him [pointing at the kid]
ma kara lakof basipur?
what happened to the monkey in the story?
Basipur kara lo shehu nafal meha’ofanayim
In the story it happened to him that he fell off the bicycle
ha’im hakof avad?
did the monky lost?
???
ha’im hakof avad?
did the monky get lost?
Ken
Yes
ha’im hakof halach le’ibud?
did the monky get lost?
Ken
Yes
ha’im hakof avad?
did the monky lost?
???
at mekira et hamila avad?
do you know the word lost?
Lo
No
98

o’i nistakel al tmuna [[4]], ma kara betmuna [[4]]?
let’s look at picture number [[4]], what happened in picture number [[4]]?
Betmuna 4 kara sheha’ima machzika oto ve’oto, ve’acharey ze hem halchu habayta, ve’acharey
ze eych hem mots’im oto? Hem yots’im achshav. . . lo, ze haya beze, ze haya kol kach ktsat.
In picture 4 it happened that the mother is holding him and him, and after that they went
home, and after that how are they finding him? They are going out now. . . no, it wa not in
this, it was {a} little, it was so short. . .
ma?
what?
Hasipur haze, ze haya ktsat, ze sipur katsar
That story, that was a little, that is {a} short story.
nachon, anachnu achshav mesaprim sipurim mamash ktsarim, sipur shel tmuna
achat
right, we are now telling stories that are very short. {a} one picture story
ma kara betmuna [[10]]?
what happened in picture [[10]]?
Ha*mice* ah. . . ve’acharey ha*mice* rotsim shehu yetse
The *mice* ah. . . and after {that} the mice wanted him to go out
Ve’acharey ze hem halchu habayta [matsbi’a al haima vehayeled]
And after that they went home [pointing at the mother and the boy]
ma kara betmuna [[8]]?
what happened in picture [[8]]?
Ve’acharey ze hu bacha
And after he cried
ma kara betmuna [[9]]?
what happened in picture [[9]]?
Ve’acharey ze hu bacha
And after he cried
Ve’acharey ze hem yatsu limtso oto, ve’acharey ze hu bacah, ve’acharey ze *raining* gam
And after that the went out to find him, and after that he cried, and after that *raining* too
Yarad geshem?
it was raining?
Yarad geshem
99

{it} was raining
Ve’acharey ze hem halchu habayta
And after that they went home
ma kara betmuna [[11]]?
what happened in picture [[11]]?
Hu haya bifnim ha’ets
He was inside the tree
Az hu. . . hem yashvu alav vehem achlu oto vehem yashnu vehem tsachaku mimeno. . . veze
asur.
The he. . . they sat on him ate and they ate him and they slept and they laughed about
him. . . and it {is} forbidden.
Aval achshav hu vehu asa, tafas baregel shelo
But now he and he did, caught his leg
Vehu asa tsh tsh tsh vehem asu kacha [meshichot]
And he did tsh tsh tsh and they did like this [pulling]
ma kara betmuna [[14]]?
what happened in picture [[14]]?
Hu shiber et hayad shelo
He broke 21 his hand
Tir’i [matsbi’a al hazanav]
Look [pointing at the tail]
ma kara betmuna [[15]]?
what happened in picture [[15]]?
Po kara mashehu mtschik [tsocheket]
Here happened something funny [laughing]
Ve’az hem herimu. . . az hu vehu vehem vehem herimu oto, az hem asu oto kacha [matsbi’a al
ha’achbarim hatluyim al habeged] vehem dibru al hayad shelo [matsbia al ha’achbarim betachtit
hatmuna]
And then they picked up. . . .and then he and he and them and them picked him up, so they
did him like that [pointing the mice that are hanged on his cloth] and they talked about his
hand [pointing at the mice at the bottom of the picture]
ma kara betmuna [[17]]?
21 wrong pattern
100

what happened in picture [[17]]?
Tir’i az hem asu. . . [yoreder mehakise]
Look so they did. . . [getting of the chair]
[madgima et hatnucha shel hakof]
[showing the position of the monkey]
veze kol kach ko’ev po, vegam barosh
And it is so painfull here, and also in the head.
yesh li she’ela al hatmuna hazo, ha’achbarim hilbishu et hakof bechazara?
I have a question anout this picture, did the mice dress the monkey back?
Ken
Yes
ha’im hem gamru lehalbish et hakof bechazara?
did they finish to dress the monkey back?
Ah. . . aval tir’i , ze shover kacha [matsbi’a al hazanav]
Ah. . . but look, that breaks 22 like that [pointing at the broken tail]
ma kara betmuna [[19]]?
what happened in picture [[19]]?
Az hem asu kacha . . . [tnu’ot shel dchifa]
So they did like that. . . [motions of pushing]
ma kara betmuna hazo [[23]]?
what happened in this picture [[23]]?
Em. . . az yesh lahem tinokim az ha’aba hub a “tir’u tir’u tinokim yesh lachem. . . nu. . . em. . . nu,kof”
Em, so they have babies so the father he is coming “look look babies you have. . . nu, em,
nu. . . monkey”
ma kara betmuna [[29]]?
what happened in picture [[29]]?
Az hu atsar litpos oto ve’acharey ze oto aval hu. . . pit’om hu ra’a oto ve’hu tafas tafas oto.
So he stopped {in order } to catch him and after that him but he. . . suddenly saw him and
he caught him.
ma kara batmuna hazot [[32]]?
22 should be passive voice
101

what happened in this picture [[32]]?
Az hu asa kacha [motsi’a ayn dimyonit mehadaaf]
So he did like this [pulling out and imaginary eye from the page]
hatsipor hotsi’a lakof et haeynayim?
Did the bird pull out the monkies eyes?
Ken
Yes
hi gamra lehotsi’a lakof et haeynayim?
Did she finish to pull out the monkies eyes?
Lo biglal tir’i [matsbi’a al ha’ayn hanoteret]
No because look [pointing at the remained eye]
hi hitchila lehotsi’a lakof et haeynayim?
Did she start to pull out the monkies eyes?
Ken
Yes
hi hifsika lehotsi’a lakof et haeynayim?
Did she stop to pull out the monkies eyes?
Lo. . . Ken!!
No. . . Yes!!
vema kara batmuna hazot [[32]]?
and what happened in this picture [[32]]?
Em..az, hu, tafas oto.
Em. . . then, he, caught him.
vema kara batmuna hazot [[41]]?
and what happened in this picture [[41]]?
At yoda’at eize ish ze? [sho’elet ubitshuva matsbi’a alav betmuna acheret]
Do you know which man {is} it? [asking and in reply points the man in another picture]
ha’ish batmuna hazo [chazara latmuna shelanu] tiken et hakof?
the man in this picture [back to our picture] did he fix the monkey?
Ken
Yes
102

hu gamar letaken et hakof?
did he finish to fix the monkey?
Lo. . . hu tsarich la’asot et ze [matsbi’a al hatmunot haba’ot]
No. . . he needs to do this [pointing at the next pictures]
hu hitchil letaken et hakof?
did he start to fix the monkey?
Ken, hu hitchil
Yes, he started
hu hifsik letaken oto batmuna hazot?
did he stop to fix him in the picture?
lo !!
No !!
vema kara batmuna hazot [[51]]?
and what happened in this picture [[51]]?
Hu asa kacha [mar’a tnu’a shel chibuk] He did like that [show a hug]
103

A.2 HC4.5
Telling the story
Ah, ani yoda’at al ma ze ze al yeled echad she’ibed et hakof shelo!
Ah, I know what it {is} about, it {is} about a one boy that lost his monkey!
[[3]] Api 23 vehayeled ve’ima shelo halchu leha’achil et habarvazim
[[3]] Api and the boy and his mother went to feed the ducks
[[7]] Achary ze api ibed et hakof shelo
[[7]] after that api lost his monkey
eich hu ibed et hakof shelo?
how did he loose his monkey?
Hu nafal meha’ofanayim
He fell off the bicycle
[[11]] ha’achbarim gareru oto letoch hachor shelahem
[[11]] The mice dragged him into their hole
[[13]] horidu lo et habgadim
[[13]] {they} took off his cloths. . .
[[14]] kar’u lo
[[14]] ripped {off} him
ma hem kar’u lo?
what did the ripped {off} of him?
Et habgadim
The cloths
Gareru oto. . .
Dragged him. . .
Hotsiu lo. . .
Took out of him. . .
Vegareru et habgadim shelo..arum. . .
And dragged his cloths. . . naked. . .
vepo?
23 nick name for ape - monkey in dutch
104

and here?
Ani lo yoda’at
I do not know
vema kara po?
and what happened here?
[[21]] hakipod garar oto hachutsa
[[21]] The hedgehog dragged him out
[[24]] sam oto beyn kol hakipodim ha’acherim
[[24]] {it} put him among all the other hedgehogs
[[25]] acharey ze. . . oy oy oy. . . Kulo hitmala bekotsim
[[25]] after that. . . .oh no. . . all of him got full of thorns
vema kara po?
and what happened here?
Lo yoda’at
Don’t know
[[29]] asa kacha lakipod (kof) . . . tir’i ani ya’ase la bechazara [osa la bechazara]
[[29]] did like that to the hedgehog (monkey). . . look I will do it back to her [press the birds
eye]
tesapri li, ani lo mevina, ma hatsipor asta lo?
tell me, I do not understand, what did the bird do to him?
Acharey ze. . . ani lo yoda’at
After that. . . I don’t know
az rak ma she’at choshevet, mehatsiyurim. az ma hatsipor asta lo?
so only what you think, from the pictures, what did the bird do ?
[[30]] vehatsipor herima et hakof
And the bird lifted the monkey
nachon, vema hi asta lo po?
right, and what did she do to him here?
[[34-35]] zarka letoch hamyim, oy lo. . . ba karish!
[[34-35]] Threw into the water, oh no. . . here comes {a} shark !
uma kara achar kach?
and what happened afterwards?
105

[[36-38]] hadayag ratsa litpos dag, ve’et mi hu tafas? Tafas et api!
[[36-38]] The fisherman wanted to to catch a fish, and who did he catch? He caught api!
[[41-43]] hotsi lo et habgadim, tiken lo et hazanav, sam oto bacahnut shelo,
[[41-43]] Took out his cloths, fixed his tail, put him in his store
[[44]] sam oto bacahnut - atem yod’im eifo api?
[[44]] put him in the store - do you know where api {is} ?
eifo?
where?
Hine [matsbia al hakof]
Here [points to the monkey]
[[50]] acharey ze ba yeled ve’amar sheze ha’api shelo veze sof hasipur
[[50]] after that came a boy and said that this is his api and this is the end of the story
ve’acharey ze ma kara?
and after that what happened?
[[51]] ve’az hu chibek oto
[[51]] and then he hugged him
106

A.3 HC7
Telling the story
[[1]] hayeled veha’ima chazru habayta vehayeled histkel lakof
[[1]] The child and the mother returned home and the child looked to 24 the monkey.
[[2]] ve’az hem halchu lapark
[[2]] And then they went to the park
[[3]] ve’az hem natnu ochel labrvazim
[[3]] And then they gave food to the ducks
[[4]] ve’az hem hitchil lihiyot ktsat choshech
[[4]] And then started to be a little darkness
ve’az habravzim halchu
And then the ducks went
[[5]] ve’az hem hem halchu habayta
[[5]] And then they went home
[[6]] ve’az hitchil laredet geshem
[[6]] And then rain started to drop
ve’az hakof nafal
And then the monkey fell
[[7]] ve’az hayeled chazar habayta
[[7]] And then the kid returned home
Vehu lo yada eifo hakof
And he didn’t know where {is} the monkey
[[8]] ve’az hu bacha
[[8]] And then he cried
[[9]] ve’az hem chazru lesham
[[9]] And then they went back there
[[10]] ve’az hem chipsu ta’kof
[[10]] And then they looked for the monkey
ve’az hakof haya mitachat la’ets
24 wrong preposition also in Hebrew
107

And then monkey was under the tree
[[11]] veha’achbarim hem mats’u oto
[[11]] And the mice, they found him
ve’az hem lakchu oto labayit
And then they take him to the house
[[12-14]] ve’az hem hirichu et hakof vehem chashvu sheze ochel
[[12-14]] And then they smelled the monkey and they thought that this is food.
[[15]] ve’az hem shm’u mashehu
[[15]] And then they heard something
[[16]] ve’az hakipod avar
[[16]] And then the hedgehog passed
[[17]] ve’az hakipod ra’a et ma shehem asu
[[17]] And then the hedgehog saw what they did
[[18]] ve’az hakipod nichnas letoch habayit shelahem
[[18]] And then the hedgehog entered into their house
[[19]] ve’az hem hotsiu oto mehabayit
[[19]] And then they took him out of the house
[[20-21]] ve’az hu lo yada ma ze
[[20-21]] And then he did not know what {is} it
[[22]] ve’az hu lakach et ze ito habayta
[[22]] And then he took it with him home
[[23]] ve’az hu hevi et hakof habayta
[[23]] And then he brought the monkey home
[[24]] ve’az hem yashnu ito balayla
[[24]] And then they slept with him at night
[[26]] ve’az hem hevi’u oto. . . ken
[[26]] And then they broght him. . . yes
ve’az hem halchu le’anshehu
And then they went somewhere
[[27]] ve’az hem hevi’u oto lesham
And then they brought him there
108

[[28-29]] ve’az hem ra’u orev vehu az ratsa lakachat et hakof
[[28-29]] And then they saw a magpie and he then wanted to take the monkey
[[30]] ve’az hu lakach et ze bape
[[30]] And he took it with the mouth
[[31]] ve’az hu sam et ze baken shelo
[[31]] And then he put it in his nest
[[32]] az ho hotsi lo et haeynayim
[[32]] And then he pulled out the eyes to him
[[33]] ve’az hadvorim lakchu oto
[[33]] And then the bees took him
[[34]] ve’az hu nafal lamayim
[[34]] And then he fell to the water
[[35]] ve. . . ve’az hadagim hem mats’u oto
[[35]] And. . . and then the fish they found him
[[36]] ve’az habarvazim hem sachu
[[36]] And then the ducks they swam
[[37-38]] ve’az hem. . . hadayag matsa oto
[[37-38]] And then they. . . the fisherman found him
[[39]] ve’az hu halach habayta velakach et hakof
[[39]] And then he went home and took the monkey
[[40]] ve’az hu nichnas habayta
[[40]] And then he entered home
[[41]] ve’az hu tafar oto sheyihiye kmo echad chadsh
[[41]] And then he sewed him so that he will be like {a} new one
[[42]] ve’az hu sam oto ba’ambatya
[[42]] And then he but him in the bath tube
[[43]] ve’az hu meyabesh et hase’ar shelo
[[43]] And then he dries his hair
[[44]] vehu sam et ze ba’aron. . . badvarim shehu matsa
[[44]] And he put it in the closet . . . in {with} the things he found
[[45]] ve’az hu sam et ze sham, [[46]] al hazebra hu sam
109

[[45]] And then he put him there, [[46]] on the zebra he put it
[[47-48]] ve’az hayeled ra’a et hakof
[[47-48]] And then the child he sow the monkey
[[49-50]] ve’az hu ratsa likno. . . et ze ki hu amar sheze shelo And then he wanted to bu. . . ..wanted
it because he said it {is} his
[[51]] ve’az hu halach habyta
[[51]] And then he went home
ve’az hu chibek oto
And then he hugged him
[[51]]: Retelling the story
Hayeled hu chazar habayta mehagan, ve’az hu histakel lakof
The boy returned home from the {kinder}garden, and then he looked to 25 the monkey.
Ve’az hu ratsa lehavi oto lapark ki hem halchu hachutsa
And then he wanted to bring him to the park because the went out
Vehem. . . ve’az he. . . ratsu latet ochel labarvazim,
And they. . . and then they. . . wanted to give food to the ducks
ve’az hitchil laredet geshem, And then rain started to drop,
veaz hem halchu habayta aval hakof nafal layeled,
and then they went home but then the monkey fell to the boy,
Aval hayeled lo ra’a et ze az hakof nafal.
But the boy did not see that so the monkey fell.
Ve’az hmm. . . achbarim, hem matsu (oto), v’eaz hem lakchu oto habayta,
And then hmm... mice, they found (him), and then they took him home,
Veaz hakipod hu ra’a et ze ve’az hu lakach et ze habayta,
And then the hedgehog he saw that, and then he took it home,
Ve’az hhem yashnu ito lalayla, ve’az beboker hem sichaku ito, kaftsu al ze
And then they slept with him to 26 the night, and then in the morning they played with him,
jumped on it,
Ve’az hha’orev ba, hu lakach et ze bape,
25 again wrong preposition
26 wrong preposition
110

And then the magpie came, he took it with the mouth,
Ve’az hu sam et ze baken shelo, ve’az hu nafal lamayim
And them he put it in his nest, and then he fell to the water.
at zocheret ma ha’orev asa acharey shehu lakash oto laken?
do you remember what the magpie did after he took him to the nest?
Hu hotsi lo et haeynayim?
He pulled out his eyes?
nachon
right
Az yashar lakac oto laken vehotsi lo et haeynayim shelo,
So straight {away} {he} took him to the nest and pulled out his eyes, And then he fell. . . and
then he fell into the water.
Ve’az dayag, ve’az hadagim mats’u oto,
And then fisherman, and then the fish found him,
Ve’az dayag. . . hu..ah. . . hu matsa oto mehamayim,
And then fisherman. . . he. . . ah..he found him 27 from the water,
Ve’az hu lakach oto habayta, ve’az hu asa et ze kemo kof chadash,
And then he took him home, and then he made it like {a} new one,
Ve’az hayeled ra’a et ze, ve’az hu nichnas labayit shelo,
And then the child saw it, and then he entered his house,
Ve’az hu amar sheze shelo, ve’az hu kibel et ze ve’az haya lahem ta’kof, vehu chibek oto
And then he said that it {is} his, and then he received it and then they had him, and he
hugged him.
Answering questions
ma kara batmuna hazot? [[4]]
what happened in this picture? [[4]]
az hem. . . nihiya ktsat choshech ve’az hitchil laredet geshem
then they. . . it became {a} little dark and then rain started to drop
ma kara batmuna hazot? [[8]]
what happened in this picture? [[8]]
27 another wrong preposition
111

az . . . mmm . . . az hu gila shehakof ne’ebad lo ve’az hu bacha
then . . . mmm. . . then he discovered that the monkey got lost to him and then he cried
ma kara batmuna hazot? [[11]]
what happened in this picture? [[11]]
ha’achbarim hem mats’u oto, hem hevi’u oto az habayta vehem herichu vehistaclu ma ze
bichlal. . . vehem chashvu sheze ochel.
the mice they found him, they brought him then home and they smelled and looked what is
it anyway. . . and they thought it {is} food.
ma kara batmuna hazot? [[13]]
what happened in this picture? [[13]]
az hem histaklu im ze ochel ve’az hem hirichu.
so they looked whether it {is} food and then they smelled
ma kara batmuna hazot? [[14]]
what happened in this picture? [[14]]
mm. . . echad hagurim hu as aim hashinayim
mm. . . one of the baby animals he did {something} with the teeth
vehazanav?
and the tail?
nikra?
got torn?
nachon
right
ma kara batmuna hazot? [[19]]
what happened in this picture? [[19]]
hem lo yoter rotsim et ze vehakipod amar lahem shehu rotse et ze veaz hem motsi’im oto ve’az
hem notnim et ze lakipod
they do not anymore want it 28 and the hedgehog told them that he wants it and then they
are taking him out and then {they} arre giving it to the monkey.
ma kara batmuna hazot? [[26]]
what happened in this picture? [[26]]
hem lakchu oto, vehem halchu lesivuv az hem lakchu oto lesachek shama
they took him, and they went for a round so they took him to play there
28 awkward word order also in Hebrew
112

ubatmuna hazot ma kara? [[29]]
and in this picture what happened? [[29]]
ha’orev hu ra’a et ze milemala, mipo [matsbia al ha’orev] veaz hu gam ratsa et ze ki haya lo
kol miney dvarim yafim baken, ve’az hu geresh et hakipod ve’az hu lakach et ze.
the magpie he saw this from above, from here [points the magpie] and then he also wanted it
because {there} was to him all sorts of nice things in the nest, and then he drove away the
hedgehogs and then he took it.
ubatmuna hazot ma kara? [[32]]
and in this picture what happened? [[32]]
hu motsi..emm..yesh lo et hakof. . . ve’az hu motsi et ha. . . ayin achat
he takes out. . . mmm. . . he has the monkey. . . and then he takes out the. . . one eye.
hatispor hotsia lo et haeynayim?
did the bird take out his eyes?
ayin achat
one eye
uma kara po? [[33]]
and what happened here? [[33]]
hadvorim mats’u oto ve’az hem lakchu et ze meha’orev
the bees found him and then they took it from the magpie
uma kara po? [[34]]
and what happened here? [[34]]
ve’az hem hepilu oto lamayim
and then they dropped it into the water
uma kara batmuna hazot? [[39]]
and what happened in this picture? [[39]]
hadayag hu ahh. . . hu matsa ta’kof vehu lakach oto habayta
the fisherman he ahh. . . he found the monkey and he took him home
ubatmuna hazot ma kara? [[44]]
and in this picture what happened? [[44]]
az, ah..hem pashut mar’im et hacheder ve’et hakof shehaya
then, ah. . . they simply show the room and the monky that was {there}
nachon, aval ma kara basipur keshehakof higia lepo?
113

ight, but what happened in the story when the maonkey arrived here?
az hu asa shehu yihiye kemo kof chadash ve’az hu sam oto po
so he made that he will be like {a} new monkey and then he put him here
ubatmuna hazot, hadyag token et hakof? [[41]]
and in this picture, did the doctor fix the monkey? [[44]]
ken
yes
hu tiken oto?
did he fix him?
?...
?...
hu gamar letaken oto?
did he finish to fix him?
lo
no
ubatmuna hazot ma kara? [[51]]
and in this picture what happened? [[51]]
hayeled mechabek et hakof
the boy is hugging the monkey
at zocheret, ha’im ha’achbarim hilbishu et hakof?
do you rememeber, did the mice dress the monkey?
eh. . . lo
eh. . . no
114

A.4 HA27
Telling the monkey story
[[1]] ima vehayeled omdim latset mehabayit, hayeled lavush bekova, kfafot, tsa’if vehakol
muchan, aval tsarich od lakachat et hakof shelo yachad ito. Hu mechapes veze. . . hakof kamuvan
nimtsa bamita shemitachat lakise ahemitachat lasmicha, ve. . . zehu.
[[1]] Mom and the kid are standing to go out of {are about to leave} home, the kid is dressed
{up} with a hat, gloves, scarf, and everything is ready, but {he} still needs to take his monkey
with him. He is looking and. . . the monkey of course is in the bed that is under the chair that
is under the blanket, and. . . that’s it.
[[2]] ve..tov,hayeled lakach et hakof ak hakise ha’achori baofanayim she lima shelo kmo shehayeladim
haholanding nohagim la’asot, veyats’u laderech. (ah, mistaber shehem halchu lapark).
Veyats’u laderech.
[[2]] And. . . well, the kid took his monkey on the back sit of his mother’s bike, like the dutch
kids are tending {tend} to do, and {they} went to {on} the way. (oh, it is turning out {it
turns out} that they went to the park) . and {they} went to {on} the way.
[[3]] hem higi’u lapark and (ah, ze gan chayot, lo ze park) hem higi’u lapark, vehitchilu
leha’achil et ha’avazim, habarvazim, et ha..avazim vehabarvazim. [hitnatslut](ein po shum
chaya acheret. Yesh po shney sugim shel barvazim).
[[3]] They got to the park and (oh, it’s {a} zoo, no it’s {a} park) They got to the park, and
started to feed the gooses, the ducks, the. . . gooses and ducks. [apologetic] (there are no other
animals here, there are here two types of ducks).
[[4]] tov, lo avar zman katsar, ubeholand kmo shekore tamid hitchil laredet geshem. Zot omeret,
hem rau sheananim, sheananim shchorim mm..ah..mitrabim barakia.
[[4]] Googok, short time didn’t pass {shortly after}, and in the Nederland like it is always
happening, rain started to go down {it started the rain}. That means, they saw that black
—-,— mm..huh. . . are — {growing} in the sky.
[[5]] ha’ima lakcha et hayeled ve’et hakof, sama otam maher al hakise ha’achori baofanayim
havrudim, ve-yats’u laderech.
[[5]] The mother took the child and the monkey, put them quickly on the back sit in {of} the
pink bicycle and- {they} went to {on} the way.
[[6]] ve-kamuv. . . ve-achary shehitchil geshem zal’afot lo avar zman katsar vehkof hit’ofef
meha’ofanayim venirtav kashot.
[[6]] And-of cour. . . and-after heavy rain started short time didn’t pass {shortly after} and
the monkey flew-around 29 off the bicycle and fell and hardly {badly} 30 got wet 31 .
29 literal translation of banyan hitpael
30 hardly in Hebrew is literally badly
31 literal translation of the banyan nifal
115

[[7]] hayeled chazar habaita, vegila shehakof eino..eh..lo imo. . . lo nimtsa yoter al haofanayim,
vehitchil lechapes oto shuv.
[[7]] The child returned {went back} to the home /footnotenice way if indefinite and direction
mark, and discovered {found out} that the monkey is not ..hmm..is not with him. . . huh.. is
not found 32 on the bicycle anymore, and started to look for him again.
[[8]] zehu. acharey. . . aval kamuvan shehakof lo haya . . . lo haya babayit ki hu nafal baderch
velachen hayeled hitchil livkot.
[[8]] That’s it, after. . . but of course that the monkey was not 33 . . . was not at the house
because he {it} fell in {on} the way and therefore the kid started to cry.
[[9]] gam haima vegam hayeled samu me’il lakchu mitria, vehalchu lechpes et hakof ha’avud.
[[9]] Also the mother and also the child 34 put {on a} coat, took {an} umbrella, and went to
seek {look for} the lost 35 monkey.
[[10]] hem chipsu bapark, hem chipsu mitachat la’ets haze vemitachat la’ets haze, ve’et hakof
lo matsu.(hem lo mats’u?, ken hem lo mats’u)
[[10]] They sought {looked for} at the bark, they sought under this tree and under this tree,
and the monkey they the didn’t find 36 . (They didn’t find? Yes, they didn’t find).
[[11]] aval mi aval ma, hayu kama (ah derech agav ze lo kof, ze bubat kof. . . achshav anachnu
megalim) bekitsur, aval ma, et hakof ken mats’u mishpachat chuldot (nir’a li) velakchu otam
(oto) habaita ki bachtsh haya kar veratuv. Ha’ima vehayeled kamuvan mamshichim lechapes.
[[11]] But who but what, there were some (oh, by the way, this is not a monkey this is a
monkey doll. . . now we are discovering {find out}) in short, the monkey indeed {they} find
{a} family of rats. (I think) and took them (him) to the house because {it} was cold and
wet. The mother and the child of course are continuing to look.
[[12]] (tov, ma kore po?) hachuldot hayu meod mesukranot mehakof, mehachaya hamuzara
hzot shehem mats’u, ubichlal - lama hi levusha bechol miney bgadim me’al haparva shela? Az
hem huitchilu lehistkel.
[[12]] (well, what’s going on here?) The rats were very courious 37 from {of} the monkey, from
{of} the weird animal that they {have}found, and so - why is she {it} dressed {up} with all
sorts of weird clothes on top of her {its} PARVA?..so they started to look.
[[13]] aval ma, mashchu po mashchu sham, [[14]] vehop, nikra hazanav.
[[13]] But what, {they} pulled here, {they} pulled there, and hop, the tail got torn 38
[[14]] hachuldot hayu me’od nis’arot mehauvda shnikra hazanav lakof vehem lo yad’u ma la’asot
(..ma? ..ma kore po?) ad shehitsi’a echad ha’achbaroshim likshor pashut et hazanav bechazara.
32
again banyan nifal - is found
33
to be in the meaning of exist
34
this is a not very common but possible form of two ’also’ to stress that they both did something
35
perfect as passive voice adjective
36
here I chose to stick with the word order because it is not common and put the monkey in the focus
37
not a common conjugation of binyan pual - mesukran vs sakran
38 again binyan nifal
116

Veze ma she’asu. Beynatayim chatsi mimishpachat ha’achbarim himshicha lehishtolel im
habeged hamuzar shelavash hakof al haparva shelo.
[[14]] The rats were very upset from the fact that the tail got turn to {off} the monkey and
did not know what to do, despite that . . . (. . . what? . . . what is happening here?) until one of
the rats suggested to simply tie the tail back. And this {is} what they done. Meanwhile half
of the family of rats continued to full around 39 with the weird cloth that the monkey wore on
his PARVA.
[[16]] tov, lo avar zman, vehageshem hifsik, vehakipod shaya tamid chaver tov shel ha’achbaroshim
ba leveker.
[[16]] well, time didn’t pass {very shortly}, and the rain stopped {it stopped raining}, and
the hedgehog that was always {a} good friend of the rats, came to visit.
[[17]] hakipod dachaf ta’rosh lameluna shel ha’achbaroshim (meura), vera’a otam osim mashehu
muzar im ha. . . ah. . . im kof shehu..im kof. vemalbishim ah..vesamim alav eize masheu kachol
im nekudot tsehubot.
[[17]] The hedgehog pushed the head to the MELUNA of the rats, and saw the doing something
with the. . . with {a} monkey that is . . . with {a} monkey. And are dressing..huh. . . and are
putting on him some something 40 blue with yellow dots.
[[18]] tov, az ha. . . (ma ze, ma kore, ani chayav lada’at ma kore, ani lo yachol lesaper et hasipur
kacha). bekitsur, hakipod dachaf et rosho lemeurat ha’achbaroshim vesha’al ma kore,[[19]] az
ha’achbaroshim hechlitu leharot lo ma kore vepashut dachafu et hakof chazara hachtsa.
[[18]] Well, so the. . . (what {is} it, what {is} happening, I must know what {is} happening, I
cannot tell the story like that). In short, the hedgehog pushed his head to the MEURA of the
rats and asked what is happening. [[19]] so the rats decided to show him what is happening
and pushed the monkey back out.
[[20]] ha’achbarosh (hakipod) ra’a et harosh shel hakof yotse mehabayit venivhal. Hu amar:
”ma ze harosh haze, ze bichlal lo rosh shel achbarosh, bachayim sheli lo ra’iti rosh kaze”. [[21]]
aval ma. . . mesukran tafas et harosh shel hakof vemashach oto hachutsa, vehalach lehavi oto
habaita.
[[20]] The rat (the hedgehog) saw the head of the monkey exiting of the home and got scared.
He {it} said: ”what is it this head, this is not at all {a} head of {a} rat, in my life I didn’t
see {never in my life have I seen} such {a} head”. [[21]] But what. . . being courious 41 caught
the head of the monkey and and pulled him {it}out. and went to bring him home.
[[21]] bekitsur, lakack oto, mashach, pit’om ra’a sheze kof amar :”bona 42 eize kof chamud ani
mevi et ze layeladim lir’ot. Chayav”.[[22]] Sam oto al hagav vehitchil lalelchet.
[[21]] In short, took him {it}, pulled, all of a sudden saw that it’sa moneky, said: ”c’mon,
what {a} cute monkey, I am bringing 43 him to the kids to see. {I} must. [[22]] Put him {it}
39 this not very literal translation actually fits the mood of binyan hitpael here
40 there is indeed double specification here - think of ’some cloth’ but with ’something’ instead of cloth
41 again translating the binyan required more then the word courios
42 not really a grammatical Hebrew word, more of a short cut for come here and look
43 here the present indicate definite intension. A bit awkward but possible
117

on the back and started to walk.
[[23]] halach halach halach, ad lasiach hakarov sheme’ever la’ets, sham matsa et ishto hakipoda
veshloshet hgurim.
[[23]] Walked walked walked, until the close bush that {is} beyond the tree, there {he} found
his wife the hedgehog and the three baby animals.
[[24]] Kamuvan shehagurim, hakof kol kach chamud, hit’ahavu be miyadm, hitcarbelu kulam
echad basheni vehalchu lishon.
[[24]] of course that the GURIM, the monkey {is} so cute, fell in love 44 , HITCARBELU
everybody one in the other, and went to sleep.
[[25]] achari shnats (shnat tsohorayim) tov vemera’anen, hit’oreru hakofim. . . hit’oreru hakipodim
vehitchilu lishol et atsmam ma la’asot im hakof hachadash, im habigud hamuzar vearba(at ha-)
caftorim.
[[25]] After {a } good and refreshing nap, the monkeys woke up. . . the hedgehogs woke up,
and started to ask themselves what to do with the new monkey, with the weird clothing 45
and the four bottons.
[[26]] hem lo yad’u ma laasot az hm lakch oto. . . az hem yatsu ito letiyul.
[[26]] They didn’t know what to do so they took him {it}. . . so the exit {went out} with him
to {a} trip.
[[27]] samu oto al hagav vehitchilu lalechet. halchu halchu halchu halchu, halchu halchu halchu
halchu, ad shepitom mashehu kara.
[[27]] {They} put him {it} on the back and started to walk. walked walked walked walked,
walked walked walked walked, until something happened.
[[28]] (ha. . . tov nu. . . yesh po chaya acheret) mashehu kara, hem meod niv’halu. Al haets haya
ore. Gadol.
[[28]] (huh. . . yea well. . . there is {a} different animal here) something happened, they got very
scared. On the tree {there} was a magpie. Big {one}.
[[29]] haorev ra’a et hakof hachamud, miyad ratsa oto letsmo, ma shelo matsa chen be’eyney
hakipodim aval ma la’asot, orvim ze orvim, pashut nachat al hakof, lakach oto, vegeresh et
kol hakipodim.
[[29]] The magpie saw the cute monkey, immediately wanted him {it} for himself {itself}, what
didn’t MATSA CHEN in the eyes of the hedgehogs but what to do {what can we do} magpies
are magpies, {he} simply landed on the monkey, and kicked GERESH all the hedgehogs.
[[30]] velean lakach haorev et hakof? Habaita kamuvan , laken, [[31]] eifo she’efshar limtso
shinayim totavot, shnei (shtei) einayim, he. . . veod kol miney dvarim.
[[30]] And where did the magpie take the monkey? Home of course, to the nest, [[31]] where
that {it} is possible to find {can be found} fake teeth, two eyes, heh..and more kinds of things.
44 lexical translation, binyan hitpael of love
45 is it nominalization of some form? Not sure
118

[[32]] haorev, shelo haya chaya kol kach yafa, histakel al hakof veamar: ”bona, haeinayim shel
hakof haze nir’im (nir’ot) li meanyenot, talash lakof ayin achat.
[[32]] The magpie, that want not so beautiful {an} animal, looked on {at} the monkey and
said: ”C’mon, the eyes of this monkey are seem to me 46 interesting”, pulled {out} to the
monkey one eye.
Hakof kvar hitvhil lid’og sheod shniya haorev ikach lo gam et ha’ayin hashniya, vebichlal, et
hacaftorim hanechmadim shyesh lo bamichnasayim shehu kibel shana she’avra layomhuledet.
The maonkey started to worry that in a second the magpie will take to him also the other eye,
and also, the cute bottons he has in {on} the pants that he got last year for {his} birtheday.
[[33]] aval ma, ba’u kama. . . veaz ba’u kama. . . veaz hechelit hakof shehu po lo nish’ar, dachaf
et atsmo mehaken. . . vehitchil lipol le’ever haritspa.
[[33]] But what, {there} came some. . . and then came some. . . and then the monkey decided
that he, here, doesn’t stay 47 , pushed himself {itself out} off the nest. . . and started to fall
towards the floor.
Lemazalenu, hayu bashchuna kama dvorim shehechlitu shekof ze davar shebevaday batuach lo
yachol lauf, velakchu oto ktsat. . . ahh..ze. aval dvorim kmo sheatem yod’im lo. . . chayot kol
kach ktanot, lo. . . kol kach kasha lischov kof kaze gadol. Ma kara? Acharey shloshim meter
shel maof 48 nafal hakof mehayadayim, vehitchil lipol shuv le’ever haritspa.
To our luck {fortunately}, there were in the neighbourhood some bees that decided that
{a} monkey is {a} thing that of course definitely will not be able to fly, and took him {it}
some. . . huh..it’s. . . but bees as you know {are} not. . . such small animals, not. . . it is so hard
to carry such {a} big monkey. What happened? After 39 meters of flying 49 fell the monkey
off the hands. And started to fall again towards the floor.
[[34]] aval, lemazalenu, hayah ze me’al ha’agam shebe’emtsa hapark, vehakof pashut nafal
lamayim.
[[34]] But, for our luck {fortunately}, It was above the lake that {is} in the middle of the
park, and the monkey simply fell into the water.
[[35]](Tov, beseder.) bekitsur, ba’agam, beoto zman, histovevu mishpachat barvazim vekol
miney chayot acherot, tsfarde’im lemineyhem, veod mishehu besira ktana miniyar. buba
ktana.
[[35]] (Well, ok), in short, in the lake, at the same time, rolled around 50 {a} family of ducks,
different kinds of frogs, and another figure in a small boat made of paper. A small doll.
hakof shekamuvan lo yada lischot pashut tava venafal al haritspa, eifo shehaya, hiva, atraktsya
lecol hadagim.
46 this present with binyan niphal - this not a literal translation that would be something like looking to me’
which I found too awkward
47
again I saved the word order for focus on the place
48
nominalization
49
note the use of nominalization
50
again, hitpael of rolled
119

The monkey that off course didn’t know {how} to swim, simply drawn and fell onto the
ground, where {it} was {served as} an attraction to all fishes 51 .
[[36]] shama yashav hakof, ad cama zman. . . ad she. . . [[37]] ad she’ala bechakato shel dayag
nechmad [[38]] sheyashav vehe’evir et hazman me’al ha. . . al sfat ha’agam bapark.
[[36]] There sat the monkey, until some time. . . until that. . . [[37]] until that {it} came up in
a hook of {a} nice fisherman [[38]] that sat 52 and passed 53 the time on the. . . on the bank of
the lake at the park.
[[38]]hadayag, shehaya lema’ase ish, ish eh. . . zaken vechaviv chashav leatsmo ”o, ma ose po
kof ratuv vemisken betachtit ha’agam? [[39]] ani chayav lakachat oto h. . . le. . . eh. . . chanut
ezra rishona le, ze, lebubot.
[[38]] The fisherman, that was in fact {a} man, {an} old and kind man, thought to himself
”oh, what’s doing here {a} poor wet monkey at the bottom of the lake? [[39]] I must take
him {it} hmm. . . to. . . eh..a first aid store for dolls.
[[40]] hakof ba habaita, eh. . . hadayag ba habaita lachanut shelo vehichlit shehu et hakof metaken.[[41]]
Kmo sheatem zochrim, ha’achbaroshim shehayu meod sakranim ma ze hachaya. . . hazanav
hamuzar haze sheyotse mehakof mashchu mashchu vekar’u, kar’u et hazanav ve’asu kesher
bechazara, lo matsa chen be’eyney ha’ish hazaken, shetiken et ze miyad.
[[40]] The monkey came home. ehh. . . the fisherman came home to his store, and decided
that is fixing 54 the monkey. [[41]] as you rememeber the rats were very courios what is the
animal. . . this weird tail the goes out of the monkey pull pull and tore, tore the tail and made
{a} tie back, didn’t —- to the eyes of the old man, that immediately fixed it.
[[42]] kmo chen hu sam lo ayin chadash sheyuchal lir’ot, verachats oto ba’ambatya, [[43]] yibesh
oto (ba)meyabesh,[[44]] vesam oto bamita yachad im shar hatsa’atsu’im bachanut.
[[42]] Also he put to him {it} a new eye for that he will be able to see, and washed him {it}
in the bath, [[43]] dried him {it} (with the) drier, [[44]] and put him in bed together with the
rest of the toys in the store.
[[45]] acharey shehakof yashan, hitra’anen, vehaya chadish u’me’ushar, lakach oto ha’ish hazaken,
vesam oto al hazebra shebechalon hara’ava.
[[45]] After the monkey slept, refreshed himself 55 and was ‘newy’ and happy, took him {it}
the old man, and put him {it} on the zebra that {is} in the —-.
[[46]] sham yashav hakof vehishkif al ha’am, velefata, ra’a et hayeled, hachamud, shehu haya
shayach elav, nose’a bamizchelet, im ima shelo, al hasheleg.
[[46]] There sat the monkey and observed {on} the people, and suddenly, saw the kid, the
cute {kid}, that he was belonged 56 to him, driving in a —-, with his mother, on the snow.
51
here I use plural on purpose to stress the different kinds of fish in the lake
52
that would be a tipical past progressive ’was sitting’ in english
53
active form of pass
54
again the present denotes immediate intention
55
translating binyan hitpael
56 awkward
120

[[47]] hakof meod kiva shehayeled yasim lev. achen hayeled histakel al chalon hara’ava kmo
shetamid haya mistakel al chalonot hatsa’atsu’im, [[48]] vera’a: ”ah, hine hkof sheli! Ima ima
hine hakof sheli!”.[[49]] ha’ima amra ”way, bo nicanes venistakel”
[[47]] The monkey very much hoped that the kid will pay attention. Indeed the kid looked
on {at} the window, as always that he was looking 57 on the toys windows, [[48]] and saw:
”oh, here 58 is my monkey! Mom mom here is my monkey”. [[49]] The mother said ”wow let’s
enter and look 59 .”.
[[50]] hayeled nichnas lachanut veamar la’ish hazaken vehachaviv ”ish ish eifo matsata et
hakof? Hakof haze sham al hazebra ze hakof sheli!”.
[[50]] The kid entered to the store and said to the old and kind man” Man, man 60 where did
you found the monkey? That monkey over there on the zebra is my monkey!”
[[51]] (he. . . mm. . . bekitsur) ha’ish hazaken shelanu amar miyad matsati et ze, tikanti oto,
betachtit ha’agam. hine ani achzir lecha chazara, u’meaz hayeled yachad im hakof me’ushar
yachad im hakof forever and ever velo nasa ito yoter al ofanayim bacahayim.
[[51]] (eh..mm. . . in short) our old man immdeiatly said I found it, fixed it, at the bottom of
the lake, here I will return {it} back {give it back} to you, and since then the kid was happy
together with the monkey forever and ever 61 one and never in {his} life rode more with him
on {a} bicycle.
Retelling the story - picture [[51]]
(bekitsur) yeled echad. . . yeheld echad haya..(..tov) hayo 62 haya yeled (nesapek lach po materia..).
(in short) one kid. . . one kid was . . . (..well), once upon a time (there) was {a} kid.
Hayo haya yeled shehaya (hayta) lo bubat kof. hakof tamid ah..yashav..vehayeled vehakof hayu
beyachad tamid.
Once upon a time {there} was {a} kid that {there} was to him a monkey doll. The monkey
always sat . . . ehh..and the kid and the monkey were together always 63 .
Yom echad ha’ima vehayeled yats’u. . . ehh..amdu latset mehabayit vehayeled kmo shehu tamid
haya lakach et ha. . . halach leifo shehakof yashav bamita mitachat lashulchan mitachat lasmicha,
lakach et hakof ubeyachad hem nas’u al haofanayim lapark.
One day the mother and the child went out . . . .stood to go out {were about to go out} and
the kid like he always was took the . . . went to were the monkey sat in the bed under the
table under the blanket, took the monkey, and together they they rode on the bicycle to the
park.
57 it looks like past progressive but it is definitely not
58 here is probably not the best translation of hine
59 these both appear in future niphal conjugation
60 this is a weird way to approach a man but it somehow works in a sense of ”hey stranger”
61 that was an easy
62 interesting conjugation
63 tipical perfect
121

Bapark hem hayu tamid ma’achilim et habarvazim she. . . et habarvazim veha. . . avazim, ma
shetamid haya gorem meod hana’a.
At the park they were always feeding the ducks that..the ducks and the. . . the gooses, what
always caused very much pleasure.
Veulam hapa’am, kmo shelif’amim kore, acharai, ah. . . acharei lo harbe zman hitchilu hashsmayim
lehit’anen beananim shchorim.
And however, this time, like that {it} sometimes is happening..after ..ah. . . after no a lot of
time the sky started to get clouded 64 with black clouds.
Ha’ima shechashva sheholech laredet geshem lakcha maher et hayeled, sama oto al ha’ofanayim
vehem chazru chazara.
The mother that thought that it is going to rain 65 took quickly the kid, put him on the bicycle
and they went back.
Veachen lo avar zman rav vegeshem zal’afot hitchil laredet.
And indeed, long time did not pass {shortly after}, heavy rain started to drop.
Umerov geshem hayeled ibed et hakof.
And for all the rain the kid lost his monkey.
Hayeled higi’a habaita, ratsa lasim et hakof bamita shemitachat lashulchan shemitachat lasmicha,
aval ein kof!
The kid arrived home, wanted to put the monkey in the bed that {is} under the table that
{is} under the blanket, but there is no monkey!
Ma kara? hayeled haya me’od atsuv vehitchil livcot veha’ima lakcha-garera et hayeled ubeyachad
bageshem im hamitria hem halchu lechapes et hakof.
What happened? The kid was very sad and started to cry and the mother took-dragged the
kid and together they went to look for the monkey.
Aval hakof, shenafal baderech, lo hayay eifo shehu haya ki bazman-baderech mats’u oto kama
chuldot. Achbaroshim sheme’od hit’anyenu bakof velakchu oto itam habaita.
But the monkey, that fell on the way, was not were he was because at the time-on the way
founf him a few rats. Rats who got very much interested 66 in the monkey and took him {it}
with them home.
ha’achbarosim, shelo kol kach hevinu ma ze hakof hamuzar haze velama bichlal hu lovesh
dvarim kchulim im nekudot tsehubot alav, vehitchilu limshoch po velimshoch sham, u’bimyuchad
mashchu bazav.
The rats, that didn’t understand so much what is this weird monkey and why anyway he {it}
is wearing blue things with yello dots on it, and started to pull here pull there, and especially
they pulled the tail.
64 conjugate clouding for binyan hitpael
65 not picky on this Hebrew term for raining
66 look for better translation
122

kamuvan shehazanav shel ha. . . lo avar harbe zman vehazanav shel hakof nikra, ma shehifchid
et ha’achbaroshim od yoter ki hem lo ahavu kol kach likro {?} lekofim, aval, merov pachad
hem hichlitu shehem pashut koshrim et hazanav bechazar, aval hem hichlitu shehem osim lakof
tova velokchim mimeno et habeged hamuzar im hanekudot hatsehubot.
Of course the tail of the. . . long time did not pass {after a short while} and the tail of the
monkey got torn, what scared the rats more because they didn’t like to call? monkeys, but,
out of fear they decided that they are simply tying the tail back, but they decided that they
do the monkey a favout and take the weird cloth with the yellow dots from him.
zehu, acharei ah ze, kacha hem himshichu veod acharei, lo avar harbe zman veba. . . ba hakipod
vehitanyen ma kol hara’ash vehahamula mibeitam shel ha’achbarim. . . shel ha’achbaroshim.
That’s it, after ehh that, they continued like that and even after, not much time {have}
passed..came. . . came the hedgehog and got interested {in} what is all the noise and the
messing about 67 from the house of the mice. . . of the rats.
Hu dachaf et harosh pnima vesha’al: ”achbaroshim, ma ze hadavar hamuzar haze? Ma ze
hadavar haze shesachavtem habaita?”
He pushed his had in and asked: ”rats, what is this weird thing? What is this thing that you
carried home?”
Az hem amru ”bo ani ar’e lecha” vedachafu et hakof hachutsa.
So they said ”cmon I will show you” and pushed the monkey out.
Hakipod meod niv’hal kshehu ra’a rosh muzar yotse maha..ze, ve. . . velakach..vebikesh meha’achbaroshim
lehotsi oto od hachtsa.
The hedgehog got really scared when {he} saw {a} weird head exiting from. . . that. . . and and
took. . . and asked the rats to get him out more.
Ksheyatsa hakof legamrei vera’a hakipod shehu mamash nechmad vehechlit shehu chayav
lakachat et ze ito habaita velehar’ot layeladim haktanim.
When the monkey exited entirely and the hedgehog saw that he {it is} very nice, and decided
that he must take this with him home and show {it} to the small children.
(bekitsur) hakof ba..ehh..hakipod sam et hakof al hagav vehitchil lalechet habaita sheze lo haya
kamuvan rachok, ze haya basiach hakarov sheme’ever la’ets.
(in short) the monkey came. . . ehh..the hedgehog put the monkey on the {its} back and started
to walk home, which of course was not far, it was in the close bush beyond the tree.
shama hayu hayeladim haktanim shel hakipod ve’isha kipoda sheme’od hitlahavu lir’ot et hakof
shehaya kamuvan me’od nechmad, vecacha kulam halchu lishon shnat tsaharayim.
There were the kids of the hedgehog and a hedgehog woman that got very excited to see the
monkey that of course was very nice, and like that everybody went to sleep SHNATS.
acharei shehem hit’oreru hem hechlitu shehem yots’im letiyul, ulay levarer meifo hakof velemi
hu shayach u’lemi lesaper, velakchu et - hayeladim lakchu et hakof al hagav, u’beyachad yts’u
67 hamula
123

kol hamishpacha letayel bapark.
After they got up, they decided that they are going out to {on} a trip, maybe to inquire from
were this monkey from and to who he {it} belongs, and to who to tell {to who they should
tell}, and {they} take - the kids took the monkey on the {their} back, and together all the
family went out for a trip in the park.
aval, bapark yeshnam dvarim mesukanim, ve’orev she’yatsa - sheyahsav al ha’ets ra’a et kol
hamishlachat, vehechelit shehakof, nir’a lo me’od chamud vehu rotse oto.
But, at the park there are dangerous things, and {a} magpie that went out - that sat on the
tree saw the entire delegation, and decided that the monkey, {it} seems to him very cute, and
he {it} wants him.
hakofim..ehh..hakipodim ktsat niv’halu velo yad’u ma la’asot, aval lo haya (hayta) lahem brera
ha’orev chaya yoter gdola u’pashut nachata aleyhem, gersha otam velakcha et hakof laken.
The monkeys..ehh.. the hedgehogs got a little bit scared and didn’t know what to do, but they
had no choice, the magpie {is a} bigger animal, and simply land {down} on them, GERSHA
them, and took the monkey to the nest.
shama baken haya. . . beken shel ha’orev hayu kama dvarim, sha’on zahav, mishkafayim,
veshtei eynayim melachtiyot vegam shinayim melachutiot.
There at the nest {there} was. . . at the magpie’s nest there were several things, {a} gold
watch, glasses, two artificial eyes, and also artificial teeth.
hakof (ha’orev) hechelit sheha’ayin shel hakof meod nechmada vehu rotes ota le’atsmo u’pashut
talash et ha’ayin shel hakof.
The monkey (the magpie) decided that the eye of the monkey seem to him very nice and that
he wants it to himself {itself} and simply pulled out the eye of the monkey.
hakof niv’hal meod meha’inyan haze u’pachad shehu yikach lo gam et ha’ayin hashniya, (ve)
hu bichlal lo yuchal lir’ot yoter, vehechelit shehu po lo nish’ar, vekafats meha’ets.
The monkey got very much scared of that matter and was afraid that he {it} will take from
him also the other eye, (and) that he {it} will not be able to see anymore, and decided that
he {it} is not staying here, and jumped of the tree.
aval kofim, lo yod’im la’uf ! az hakof pashut hitchil lipol le’ever haritspa.
But monkey do not know {how} to fly !, so the monkey simply started to fall towards the
floor.
lemazalo hayu kama dvorim ba’ezor, shehechelitu shekof nofel ze lo la’inyan, velo kacha tsarich
lihiyot vehechelitu la’azor lakof vetafsu oto ba’avir.
To his luck {fortunately} there were a few beez in the area that decided that a falling monkey
is not to the point, and decided to help him {it} and caught him {it} in the air.
aval hadvorim, chayot me’od ktanot, lo yachlu laset et hakof harbe zman vegam mehen nafal
hakof, vehimshich lipol bedarco lemata.
124

But the bees, very small animals, could not carry the monkey for a long time and also from
them the monkey dropped, and continued to fall on his way down.
lemarbe hamazal ze haya me’al ha’agam shebe. . . shebelev hapark vehakof pashut nafal letoch
ha’agam.
Fortunately that was over the lake that is. . . that is at the heart of the park and the monkey
simple fell into the lake.
Behagi’o lesham nachat al hakarka’it ma she’inyen me’od et kol hadaga vehachayoit misaviv
- hachaya hamuzara hazo shenichnesa letoch hamayim.
When he {it} got there he {it} landed on the ground what interested the fishes and the
animals around - the weird animal that entered the water.
Lo. . . kacha nish’ar hakof ve. . . ad she. . . vehe’evir et hazman ad she’ish zaken shedag dagim
tafas et hakof vehe’ela oto bechakato.
No. . . the monkey stayed like that and. . . until. . . and passed the time until {an} old man
caught him {it} and got him {it} up on his hook.
ha’ish hazaken le. . . histakel al hakof ve’amar: ”ma kara le. . . ” me’od richem al hakof hamisken
haratuv vehameduvlal chasar ha’ayin shenimtsa belev ha’agam vehechelit shehu lokeach oto
lechanut hatsa’atsu’im shelo.
The old man didn’t. . . looked at the monkey and said: ”what happened to..?” he felt very
sorry for the poor wet and messy monkey without the eye that was found at the heart of the
lake, and decide to take him {it} to his toy store.
nichnas ha. . . shama yashav ha’ish hazaken vetiken et hakof verachats oto, vetafar mechadash
et hazanav, vesam lo ayin chadasha, vesam oto lishon bamita, sheyuchal lehitra’anen .
The {man} entered. . . there sat the old man and fixed the monkey and washed him {it} and
TAFAR his tail back to him {it}, and put him {on a} new eye, and put him to in bed so that
he {it} will be able to refresh.
Acharei kama. . . acharei kama sha’ot shel sheyna metuka, he’ir ha’ish hazaken vesam oto al
hazebra shemeal chalon hara’ava sheyuchal lehistakel hachutsa.
After {a} few. . . .after {a} few haour of sweet sleep the old man woke {it} up and put him
on the zebra on the window so that he will be able to look outside.
Kacha histakel lo hakof be’inyan rav al ma shkore bachuts, ad shehu lefeta ra’a et ha’ima
vehayeled ze shehu haya shyach elav vecol hachayim haya ito machlikim basheleg.
This way looked the monkey with a lot of interest on what is happening out, until he {it}
saw the mother and the kid the one he was belong to and was with hin his entire life skating
in the snow.
Hakof me’od hitragesh vekiva shehayeled yistakel al hachalon veyir’e oto shama ve’achen ze
ma shekara.
The monkey got very excited and hoped that the kid will look over and will see him there
and this is exactly what happened.
125

Vehayeled histakel ve’amar: ”ima ima hine hakof sheli shelo matsanu hine hu po!”
And the kid looked over and said: ”Mom mom here is my monkey that we didn’t find, here
he is!”.
ha’ima amra ”tov bo nikanes livdok”. And the mother said ”ok well, let’s go inside and check
{it}”. Nichnesu lachanut, vehayeled yashar ra’a sheze hakof shelo.
{they} entered the store, and the kid immediately saw that this is his monkey.
Hu amar et ze la’ish hazaken, veha’ish hazaken samach me’od latet et ze layaled shechibek
miyad et hakof be’avhava raba.
Ho told it to the old man, and the old man was very happy to give it to the kid who hugghed
it immediately with lots love.
Answering questions
[[51]] ma kara lakof?
[[51]] what happened to the monkey?
hakof ne’ebad vehaya tsarich lisbol mikol miney hitaleluyot shel kol miney chayot acherot
ahetalshu oto, ad shehu nimtsa al yedey dayag ba’agam, shelakach oto habaita, tiken oto
veshataf oto vesam oto bechalon hara’ava sham ra’a oto hayeled, nichnas lachanut velakach
oto bechazara.
The mokey got lost and had to suffer from all sorts of abuses of other animals that puuled
him, until {it}was found by a fisherman in the lake, who took him {it} home, fixed him and
washed him, and put him in the window where the child saw him, entered the store and took
him back.
ha’im hakof avad?
Had the monkey been lost 68 ?
ken
yes.
ha’im hakof ne’ebad?
Did the monkey get lost?
gam ken
also yes.
ha’im hayeled ibed et hakof?
Did kid loose the monkey?
gam ken.
68 I try to find the translation that conceptually fit the question
126

also yes.
ha’im hakof halach le’ibud?
Did the monkey went to ‘lostness’ 69 ?
ken
yes.
Ma ha’achbarim asu lakof?
what did the mice do to the monkey?
ha’achbarim lakchu mehakof et ha. . . mashchu oto mikol hakivunim, kar’u lo et hazanav,
kashru lo ta’zanav chazara, vehoridu mimeno et habeged shelo vehitnadnedu alav kmo nadneda.
The mice took from the monkey the. . . pulled him from all directions, tore his tail, tied him
the tail back, and removed from im his outfit and used it as a NADNEDA.
ha’im ha’achbarim hilbishu et hakof?
Did the mice dress the monkey?
bechazara, ken, lifney shehem hotsi’u oto mehabait.
back, yes, before they — him out of the house.
ha’im ha’achbarim hitchilu lehalbish et hakof?
Did the mice start to dress the monkey?
be’eizeshehu shalav ken, gam siymu.
at some point yes, and also finished.
ha’im ha’achbarim hifsiku lehalbish et hakof?
Did the mice stopped to dress the monkey?
ah, hem siymu.
oh, they finished.
ha’im ha’achbarim hifsiku lehalbish et hakof?
Did the mice finish to dress the monkey?
ken
yes.
ma asta hatsipor lakof?
what did the bird do to the monkey?
orev.
69 weird spoken nominalization
127

magpie.
ha’orev.
the magpie.
lakcha oto laken vetalsha lo et ha’ayin, ha’ayin hayemanit.
took him to the nest and pulled out the eye, the right eye.
ha’im ha’orev hotsi lakof et haeynayim?
Did the magpie pulled out the eyes off the monkey?
B: lo, ayin.
no, eye.
ha’im ha’orev hitchil lehotsi lakof et haeynayim?
Did the magpie start to pull out the monkey’s eyes?
[hisus] ze, nu, speculatsia.
[hesitation], that is, that, speculation.
ha’im ha’orev hifsik lehotsi lakof et haeynayim?
Did the magpie stop to pull out the monkey’s eyes?
ken
yes.
ha’im ha’orev siyem lehotsi lakof et haeynayim?
Did the magpie finish to pull out the monkey’s eys?
ken.
yes.
ma asa hadoktor lakof?
what did the doctor do to the monkey?
tiken oto.
fixed him {it}.
ha’im hadoctor hitchil letaken et hakof?
Did the doctor start to fix the monkey?
ken.
yes.
ha’im hadoctor siyem letaken et hakof?
Did the doctor finish to fix the monkey?
128

ken.
yes.
ha’im hadoctor hifsik letaken et hakof?
Did the doctor stop to fix the monkey?
zot habe’aya, ha’im anachnu machlilim et ze besiyem o lo.
B: This is the problem, whether we are generalizing it within finish or not.
anachnu lo.
we are not.
az hifsik mbchinatenu ze hifsik shelo bish’at siyum.
so stopped for us is stopped not at the completion time.
ken.
Yes.
az ani tsarich leshanot et kol hadvarim mimikodem
So I need to change everything from before.
az ha’achbarim, ha’im hem hifsiku lehalbish et hakof?
so the mice, did they stop to dress the mouse?
lo.
no.
vehatsipor, ha’im hi hifsika lehotsi lakof et haeynayim?
and the bird, did she {it} stop to pull out the monkey’s eyes?
ken.
yes.
ma kara betmuna [[17]] ?
what happened in picture [[17]]?
ha’achbaroshim malbishim et hakof bechazara.
The rats are dressing the monkey back.
ha’im ha’achbaroshim hilbishu et hakof?
Did the rats dress the monkey?
malbishim et hakof.
Are dressing the monkey.
ma kara betmuna [[26]] ?
129

what happened in picture [[26]]?
mishpachat hakipodim lokachat et hakof letiyul bapark.
The hedgehogs family is taking the monkey to a walk in the park.
ha’im hakipodim halchu letiyul?
Did the hedgehgs go for a walk?
hem holchim letiyul.
they are going for a walk.
ma kara betmuna [[29]] ?
what happened in picture [[29]]?
ha’orev megarsh et hakipodim.
The magpie is — the hedgehogs.
ha’im hao’rev tafas at hakof?
Did the magpie catch the monkey?
od lo.
not yet.
ma kara betmuna [[32]] ?
what happened in picture [[32]]?
ha’orev tolesh lakof ayin.
The magpie is pulling out the monkey’s eye.
ma kara betmuna [[33]] ?
what happened in picture [[33]]?
hadvorim mistovevot misaviv lakof hanofel.
The bees are rolling-around 70 the falling 71 monkey.
ma kara betmuna [[34]] ?
what happened in picture [[34]]?
hakof nofel lamayim.
The monkey is falling into the water.
ha’im hakof nafal lamayim?
Did the monkey fall into the water?
ken.
70 binyan hitpael
71 use of present progressive as an adjective works the ssame in Hebrew
130

yes.
tmuna [[41]] ?
picture [[41]]?
hadoctor hatov tofer lakof et hazanav.
The good doctor is sowing the tail onto the monkey.
ha’im hadoctor tiken et hakof?
Did the doctor fix the monkey?
hu metaken et hakof
he is fixing the monkey.
ma kara betmuna [[4]] ?
what happened in picture [[4]]?
ha’ima ro’a sheananim shchorim mitrabim bashamayim.
the mother is seeing {sees} that black clouds are growing — in the sky.
ma kara betmuna [[8]] ?
what happened in picture [[8]]?
hayeled boche babayit.
the kid is crying at home.
ma kara betmuna [[11]] ?
what happened in picture [[11]]?
ha’achbaroshim moshchim bazanav shel hakof.
The rats are pulling the monkey’s tail.
ma kara betmuna [[14]] ?
what happened in picture [[14]]?
hazanav shel hakof nikra.
The monkey’s tail got torned up NIKRA.
ma kara betmuna [[18]] ?
what happened in picture [[18]]?
hakipod dachaf et harosh leme’urat ha’achbarim.
The hedgehog pushed his head into the rat’s cave.
ma kara betmuna [[19]] ?
what happened in picture [[19]]?
131

ha’achbarim motsi’im et hakof hachutsa mimeurat ha’achbarim.
The rats are taking the monkey out of the rat’s cave.
ma kara betmuna [[23]]?
what happened in picture [[23]]?
hakipod sochev et hakof al hagav u’mevi oto laken shelo.
The hedgehog is carrying the monkey on his back and is bringing him {it} to his {its} nest.
ma kara betmuna [[27]] ?
what happened in picture [[27]]?
ha’orev ro’e et hakipodim sochavim et hakof, hakipodim ro’im venivhalim veborchim. Ha’orev
adayin al ha’ets.
The magpie is seeing {sees} the hedgehogs carrying the monkey, the hegdhogs are seeing {see}
and getting scared and running away 72 . The magpie {is} still on the tree.
ma kara betmuna [[39]] ?
what happened in picture [[39]]?
ha’ish hazaken nigash ledelet chanut hatsa’atsu’im u’poteach et hadelet bemafteach. hu machzik
et hakof bayad.
The old man is approaching the toy’s store’s door and is opening the door with {a} key. He
is holding the monkey in his hand.
ma kara betmuna [[44]] ?
What happened in picture [[44]]?
Ro’im et hakof munach bamita, shochev, betoch chanut hatsa’atsu’im shemele’a betsa’atsu’im.
{We} see the monkey laying in bed, inside the toy store that is full of toys.
ma kara betmuna [[44]] baheksher shel hasipur?
what happened in picture [[44]] in the context of the story?
Hadoctor siyem letaken et hakof vesam oto bamita
The doctor finished to fix the monky and put him in bed.
ma kara betmuna [[51]] ?
what happened in picture [[51]]?
Hayeled kibel et hakof mehadoctor vehu machzik oto bayad vehu mechabek oto be’osher
The kid received the monkey from the doctor and he is holding him {it} in the {his} hand
and he is happily hugging him {it}.
72 I keep the ing to denote that this is the same tense conjugation used for all three verbs
132

A.5 HA24
Telling the story
[[1]] ze sipur al yeled, sheyom echad chazar habayta im ima shelo mehagan veherim et hakisuy
mehakise u’pit’om matsa buba ktana shel kof mitachat la!
[[1]] This is a story about a boy who one day returned home with his mother, moved the cover
off the chair and suddenly found a small stuffed animal of a monkey undernearh it!
[[2]] hayeled samach me’od, velakach et hakof ito, ve’ima vehu nas’u beyachad lapark hatsiburi.
[[2]] The boy was very happy, and took the monkey with him, and mom and he drove together
to the municipal park.
[[3]] ima natna ochel lekol habarvazim bagan hatsiburi vehayeled hakatan miki sichek im hakof
shelo, her’a oto labarvazim, tipel bo. . .
[[3]] Mom gave food to all the ducks {fed all the ducks} in the municipal garden and the little
boy miki played with his monkey, showed him to the ducks, and took care of him.
[[4]] upit’om, pit’om hem ra’u anan se’ara magi’a.
[[4]] And suddenly, suddenly they saw {a} stormy cloud is arriving.
[[5]] miki ve’ima barchu maher chazara habayta, [[6]] aval bli lasim lev hakof nafal ! hakof
nefal lemiki. [[7]] hem chazru habayta, u’miki pit’om gila shehakof ne’elam !
[[5]] Miki and his mother escaped quickly back home, [[6]] but without paying attention the
monkey fell ! the monkey fell {off} to miki. [[7]] they returned home, and miki suddenly
discovered that his monkey disappeared.
[[8]] miki haya atsuv me’od, vehitchil livkot, hu amar le’ima: “ima ima ne’elam li hakof!”,
aval ima amra “lo nora miki”.
[[8]] Miki was very sad, and started to cry, he said to mom: “mom mom my monkey disappeared
to me” 73 , but mom said “that’s not too bad miki”.
[[9]] aval miki hit’akesh shehem yelchu lechapes oto vekacha be’emtsa hageshem, ima vemiki
hitlabshu beme’ilim, yats’u im mitria, vehitchilu lalechet lechapes et kofifo.
[[9]] But miki insisted that they will go to search him and like that in the middle of the rain
74 , mom and miki dressed in coats, took {an} umbrella, and started to go to look for kifiko 75 .
[[10]] hem halchu bagan vehalchu bagan velo mats’u !! kofifo hamisken haya mitachat la’ets
kulo ratuv veneheras bageshem.
[[10]] They walked in the garden and walked in the garden, and didn’t find {it} ! poor kofifo 76
was under the tree all of him wet and got ruined by the rain.
73 make the disappearance somewhat reflexive
74 probably awkward in English
75 a common kickname for a monkey, made out of the stem ‘kof’ - monkey
76 another common nickname that she uses interchangeably - this happens to be the name of a monkey in a
famous cartoon series. . .
133

[[11]] velo rak shehu nirtav veneheras, male achbaroshim, achbaroshim shegaru ba’ets, mats’u
et kofifo.
[[11]] And not only that he got wet and ruined, lots of rats that lived in the tree found kofifo.
[[12]] vehitchilu le’echol oto, laharos oto. . .
[[12]] And {they} started to eat him, ruin him. . .
[[13]] kulo kulo haya male beachbaroshim mag’ilim [[14]] hem chatchu lo et hazanav [[15]]
vehit’alelu bo me’od me’od.
[[13]] All of him all of him 77 was full of ugly rats, [[14]] they cut {off} his tail [[15]] and
tortured him very much very much 78
[[16]] ve’az pit’om higi’a kipod katan mitachat la’ets shebo haya kofifo, [[17]] vera’a et kol
ha’achbaroshim shehem nitpalim lekofifo.
[[16]] And then suddenly arrived {a} little hedgehog underneath the tree in which was 79 kofifo.
[[17]] and saw all the rats that they are picking on kofifo.
[[18]] hu higiach letoch hame’ara [[19]] vehitsil et hakof! [[20-21]] hu hotsi oto mitachat la’ets
[[22-23]] vehevi oto lemishpachat hakipodim shelo.
[[18]] he pumped into the cave [[19]] and rescued the monkey ! [[20-21]] he took him {out of}
under the tree [[22-23]] and brought him to his family of hedgehogs.
[[24-25]] vekulam tiplu bekofifo - chimemu oto vetiplu bo. . .
[[24-25]] And everybody took care of kofifo - warmed him and took care of him . . .
[[26]] vehechelitu lakachat oto itam letiyul.
[[26]] And {they} decided to take him with them to {a} trip.
[[27]] az hakipodim lakchu et kofifo letiyul,[[28]] u’pit’om orev she’amad me’al ha’ets ra’a otam
holchim lahem bagan.
[[27]] So the hedgehogs too kofifo to {a} trip, [[28]] and suddenly a magpie that stood on {top
of} the tree saw them walking LAHEM in the park.
[[28]] haorev miyad hivchin bekofifo, vehechelit shehu rotse lakachat oto laken shelo
The magpie immediately noticed kofifo, and decided that he wants to take him to his nest.
[[29-30]] az hu yarad lemata, hivriach et hakipodim, vechataf et kofifo, lemala letoch haken
shelo.
[[29-30]] So he went down, drove the hedghogs away, and kidnapped kofifo, up to his nest.
[[31]] beken shel ha’orev hayu od kol miney dvarim shehu matsa kodem bagan, vekofifo haya
parit chadash ba’osef.
77 intended repetition
78 another intended repetition
79 in the senses of existed, resided . . .
134

[[31]] In the nest of the magpie there were more sorts of things that he found before at the
garden, and kofifo was a new item in the collection.
[[32]] hu sam et kofifo baken, [[33]] aval kofifo nafal mehaken, vekol miney dvorim baderech
nitpelu lekofifo [[34]] vehu nafal lamayim! Ve. . . nirtav.
[[32]] He put kofifo in the nest, [[33]] but kofifo fell off the nest, and all sorts of bees on the
way picked on kofifo [[34]] and he fell into the water! And. . . got wet.
[[35]] az sham hu shacahv lo betachtit ha’agam, vekol miney yetsurim shehayu ba’agam hivchinu
bekofifo vehitchilu lehitapel elav, kol miney dagim ktanim, barvazim, tsfarde’im, vedagim
gdolim gam.
[[35]] So there he layed to himself 80 at the bottom of the lake, and all sort of creatures that
were in the lake noticed kofifo and started to pick on him, all sorts of small fish, ducks, frogs,
and big fish too.
[[36]] vedayag sheyashav sham hishlich et chakato letoch hamayim,[[37]] vehop, kofiko nitpas
bachaka,[[38]] vehadayag histakel badavar hamerupat haze shehu matsa, hu lo hevin ma ze,
betoch ha’agam, [[39]] velakach oto ito labayit shelo.
[[36]] And {a} fisherman who sat there threw his hook into the water, [[37]] and, hop, kofiko
got caught in the hook, [[38]] and the fisherman looked at this MERUPAT thing that he
found, he did not understand what is it, in the lake, [[39]] and took it hom with him.
[[40]] hu lakach et kofifo habayta vehecehlit letapel bo velasader oto. Kofifo haya kvar bematsav
mamash garu’a.
[[40]] He took kofifo nom and decided to take care of him and fix him. Kofifo was already in
a really bad condition.
[[41]] hu tafar lo et hazanav chazara, [[42]] rachats oto, [[43]] yibesh oto, [[44]] vetala oto
leyibush im kol sh’ar habubot shehayu lo bachanut.
[[41]] He sewed his tail back to him, [[42]] washed him, [[43]] dried him, [[44]] and hanged him
to dry with all the rest of the dolls that were in the store to him {he had in his store}.
[[45]] acharey shekofifo hityabesh venach ktsat hadayag lakach oto vesam oto al eden hachalon
im kol sh’ar habubot. After kofifo turned dry and rested a little, the fisherman took him and
put him on the EDEN of the window with all the rest of the dolls.
[[46]] vehine yeled katan she’avar bachuts im mizchelet sheleg [[47]] hivchin bekofifo vehechelit
shehu me’od me’od chamud.
[[46]] And there {was} a little boy, who passed outside with his mother and [[47]] noticed
kofifo, and decided that he {is} very very cute.
[[48]] hu nisa laga’at bo derech hachalon aval hachalon haya sagur ki ze haya choref.
[[48]] He tried to touch {reach} him through the window but the window was closed since it
was winter.
80 reflexive?
135

[[49]] az hu bikesh mi’ima shelo shehem yikansu beyachad lacahnut shel hadayag veyevakshu
mimeno lehistakel bekofifo.
[[49]] So he asked his mother that they will enter together to the store of the fisherman and
will ask to look at kofifo.
[[50]] u’be’emet (ha)’ima vehayeled nichnesu lachanut shel hadayag u’bikshu mimeno lehistakel
bakof.
[[50]] And really, {the} mother and the child entered the store of the fisherman and asked
him to look at the monkey.
[[51]] hafle vafele ze oto hayeled mehatchalat hasipur ! shebidiyuk gila et kofifo etsel hadayag!
[[51]] HAFLE VAFLE this is the same boy from the beginning of the story ! who exactly
discovered kofifo at the fisherman’s !
Vehadayag natan lo bechazara et kofifo, vehayeled samach me’od, veze hakol.
And the fisherman gave him back kofifo, and the kid was very happy, and that’s all.
Retelling the story
Hayo haya yeled katan shekar’u lo miki.
Once upon a time there was a little child that was named miki 81
Veyom echad hu veimo chazru beyachad habayta vehu gila she’ima kanta lo matana, buba
ktana shel kof !
And one day he and mom returned home and he discovered/realized that his mother bought
him a present, a little stuffed animal {in a shape of a} monkey.
Miki samach me’od, vehechelit latset im ima lesachek im kofifo, u’pit’om, hitchil laradet mabul
chazak.
Miki was very happy, and decided to go out with mom to play with the monkey, and suddenly,
heavey rain started to drop.
Ve’ima amra lemiki: “bo nachazor maher habayta!” veshneyham ratsu maher habyta velo
samu lev shekofifo nafal meha’ofanayim
And mom said to miki: “come {we} will go home {let’s go home} quickly!”, and both of them
ran fast home and did not pay attention that kofifo fell off the bicycle
ad shehem chazru habayta, vemiki pit’om sam lev shekofifo ne’elam.
until they returned home, and miki suddenly noticed that kofifo disappered
hu haya atsuv me’od ve’amar le’ima: “ima, kofifo ne’elam, tsarich lachazor laparrk lechapes
oto”.
81 this is an active form like heet in dutch
136

He was very sad and said to mom: “mom kofifo disappeared, {we} need to return to the park
and look for him”.
Ve’ima amra: “lo, achshav yored geshem”,
And mom said: “no, now it is raining” 82
Aval miki amar, “lo, tsarich lachazor lechapes et kofifo!”.
But miki said, “no, {we} need to return to look for kofifo!”.
Az ima hiskima vehem lavshu shneyham me’iley geshem, lakchu mitriyot, vehalch lapark
lechapes et kofifo.
So mom agreed and they wore both of them coats, took umbrellas, and went to the park to
search for kofifo.
Chipsu chipsu velo mats’u, ki kofifo nafal mitachat legeza she lets.
Searched searched and did not find, because kofifo fell under {a} GEZA of {a} tree.
Aval mi ken matsa et kofifo? Chavura shel achbaroshim merusha’im mats’u et kofifo vehitchilu
laharos oto.
But who did find kofifo? A gang of vicious rats found kofifo and started to ruin him.
Hitchilu le’echol oto velerasek lo ta’zanav, veze haya nir’a ke’ilu ze hasof shel kofifo,
{they} started to eat hi and to smash his tail, and it looked like 83 this is the end of kofifo,
ad shelefeta higia kipod katan, ra’a et ha’achbaroshim shehorsim et kofifo, vehetsil oto misham.
Until all of a sudden arrived a little hedgehog, saw the rats that are ruining kofifo, and rescued
him from there.
Hu lakach oto misham lemishpachat hakipodim, sheme’od ahava et kofifo, tipla bo, vehechelita
lakachat oto ita letiyul.
He took him from there to the family of hedgehogs, who really loved kofifo, took care of him,
and decided to take him with her to {a} trip.
U’be’odam holchim letiyul, orev hivchin bahem milemala, vekofifo me’od matsa chen be’eynav,
And while they are walking on {a} trip, {a} magpie noticed them and he really liked kofifo 84
vehu hechelit lakachat oto elav laken, kmo shehu ose im kol miney dvarim shehu motes bapark.
And he decided to take kofifo to his nest, like he is usually doing with all sorts of things he
is finding in the park.
Az ha’orev yarad lemata betisa, chataf et kofifo mehakipodim sheniv’halu me’od u’barchu kamuvan,
velakach oto laken shelo.
82 I wasn’t pick on the literal translation here
83 note the use of the verb to be - was looked like. . .
84 again, not literal translation
137

So the magpie went down flying, kidnapped kofifo from the hedgehogs the got scared and
escaped of course, and took him to his nest.
Aval lo sam lev shekofifo nafal mehaken, derech ken shel dvorim, nafal letoch agam,
But did not notice that kofifo fell off the nest, through {a} nest of bees {beehive}, fell into
the lake.
Agam male dagim vebarvazim, vehu nafal letachtit ha’agam kulo ratuvv veharus vebaluy,
{a} lake full of fish and ducks, and he fell to the bottom of the lake all wet and ruined and
BALUY,
velo rak ze shehu nafal letoch ha’agam, hu gam nitpas bachaka shel dayag shebidiyuk yashav
vedag sham.
And not only that he fell into the lake, he also got caught in a hook of {a} fisherman who at
the same time sat and DAG there.
Vehadayag, pit’om hirgish shemashehu nitpas lo bachaka, mashach mashach bachaka, vegila
et kofifo.
And the fisherman, suddenly felt that something got caught in his hook, pulled and pulled
the hook, and discovered kofifo.
Hadayag miyad hevin shezo buba me’od nechmada aval ra’a shehi harusa legamrey
The fisherman immediately understood that this is a vey nice doll, but saw that she is
completely ruined
Az hu lakach ota habayta, vehitchil letapel ba,
So he took her home, and started to take care of her,
Hu yibesh ota, tafar la bechazara et hazanav, vesam ota im kol hachayot shehayu lo bacahnut.
He dried her, sewed her tail back, and put her with all the animals that were in his store.
Ki hu lema’ase haya dayag chovev aval hu haya moocher bubot.
Because he was {an} amateur fisherman but actually he was {a} dolls’ seller.
Vehine, bediyuk be’oto zman, miki ve’ima shelo shichaku bachuts bemizchelet sheleg.
And there/here, exactly at the same time, miki and his mother played outside with a snow
sled.
Vera’u et hachanut shel hadayag moocher habubot, vemiki hivchin bekofifo, yoshev u’mistakel
alav derech hachalon.
And saw the store of the dolls seller fisherman, and miki noticed kofifo, sitting and looking
at him through the window.
Hu nisa lakacaht oto, aval hayta sham zchuchit.
He tried to take him, but there was a glass there.
138

Vehu amar le’ima “ima ima kofifo bifnim!” ve’ima vemiki miyad nichnesu lachanut shel
hadayag moocher habubot, amru lo “kofifo. . . ”.
And he said to mom “mom mom kofifo {is} inside” and mom and miki immediately entered
the store and said to the dolls sellerfisherman “kofifo. . . ”
Vehadayag miyad hevin, hu ra’a et hasimcha be’eynav shel hayeled vehavin shekofifo shel miki,
hoshit lo oto, vemiki samach me’od.
And the fisherman immediately understood, he saw the happiness in the eyes of the boy and
understood that kofifo {is} his, gave it to him, and miki was very happy 85 .
Answering questions
[[51]] ma kara lakof?
what happened to the monkey?
hakof halach le’ibud avar tlaot veharpatka’ot vebasof hayeled matsa oto.
the monkey ’went to lostness’ 86 went through TLAOT and HARPATKAOT and eventually
the boy found him.
ma ha’achbarim asu lakof?
what did the mice do to the monkey?
ha’achbarim kirsemu bo veharsu oto
the mice — him and ruined him
ha’im hem hilbishu et hakof?
did they dress the monkey?
lo.
no.
ma ha’orev asa lakof?
what did the magpie do to the monkey?
chataf oto.
kidnapped him.
ha’im ha’orev hotsi lakof et haeynayim?
did the magpie pull out the monkey’s eye?
lo nir’a li.
I don’t think so 87 .
85 no to be verb construction here in Hebrew
86 common construction in Hebrew for getting lost
87 conceptual translation, not literal
139

ma asa hadoctor lakof?
what did the doctor do to the monkey?
tiken oto
fixed him.
ha’im hadoctor siyem lataken et hakof?
did the doctor finish to fix the monkey?
ken.
yes.
ma kara betmuna [[17]] ?
what happened in picture [[17]] ?
ha’achbaroshim nisu lehotsi lakof et habgadim.
the rats tried to take out the monkey’s cloths.
ma kara betmuna [[26]] ?
what happened in picture [[26]] ?
hakipodim lakchu et hakof letiyul.
the hedgehogs took the monkey to {a} trip.
ma kara betmuna [[29]] ?
what happened in picture [[29]] ?
ha’orev chataf et hakof mehakipodim.
the magpie kidnapped the monkey from the hedgehogs.
ma kara betmuna [[32]] ?
what happened in picture [[32]] ?
ha’orev hotsi. . . nisa lehotsi lakof et haeynayim.
the magpie pulled out. . . .tried to pull out the monkey’s eyes.
ha’im hao’rev hotsi lakof et haeynayim?
did the magpie pull out the monkey’s eyes?
achat mehen
one of them
ha’im hao’rev hitchil le hotsi lakof et haeynayim?
did the magpie start to pull out the monkey’s eyes?
hu hitchil lehotsi lo et haeynayim, ken.
140

he started to pull out his eyes, yes.
ha’im hao’rev siyem lehotsi lakof et haeynayim?
did the magpie finish to pull out the monkey’s eyes?
hu siyem lehotsi lo ayin achat
he finished to pull out one eye.
ma kara betmuna [[33]] ?
what happened in picture [[33]] ?
ha’kof nafal derech nechil shel dvorim.
the monkey fell through a — of bees.
ha’im hakof nafal lamayim?
did the monkey fall into the water?
ken.
yes.
ma kara betmuna [[41]] ?
what happened in picture [[41]] ?
hadoctor tafar lakof bechazara et hazanav.
the doctor sewed back the tail to the monkey.
ha’im hadoctor tiken et hakof?
did the doctor fix the monkey?
ken.
yes.
batmuna hazo [madgisha]?
in this picture [emphasizing]?
hitchil letaken et hakof.
started to fix the monkey.
ma kara betmuna [[4]] ?
what happened in picture [[4]] ?
ima vehayeled ra’u she’anan se’ara mitkarev.
mom and the kid saw that a storm cloud is getting closer.
ma kara betmuna [[8]] ?
what happened in picture [[8]] ?
141

hayeled hivchin shehakof ne’elam.
the boy noticed that the monkey disappeared.
ma kara betmuna [[11]] ?
what happened in picture [[11]] ?
ha’achbaroshim hitchilu lehitapel lakof velecharsem oto.
the rat’s started to pick on the monky and to eat it.
ma kara betmuna [[14]] ?
what happened in picture [[14]] ?
ha’achbaroshim shavru lakof et hazanav.
the rats broke the tail to the monkey.
ma kara betmuna [[18]] ?
what happened in picture [[18]] ?
hakipod gila et hakof mehachor hasheni.
the hedgehog discovered the monkey frome the second hole.
ma kara betmuna [[19]] ?
what happened in picture [[19]] ?
hakipod lakach oto mehaken veha’achbaroshim nisu lehitnaged velehachzik oto etslam.
the hedgehog took him out of the nest and the rats tried to object and to keep him with
them.
ma kara betmuna [[23]] ?
what happened in picture [[23]] ?
aba kipod hevi et hakof lemishpachat hakipodim.
father hedgehog brought the monkey to the hedgehogs family.
ma kara betmuna [[27]] ?
what happened in picture [[27]] ?
hakipodim shelakchu et hakof letiyul hivchinu pit’om ba’orev sheyoshev al ha’ets.
the hedgehogs that took the monkey for {a} trip noticed suddenly the magpie that is sitting
on the tree.
ma kara betmuna [[39]] ?
what happened in picture [[39]] ?
hadayag moocher habubot doctor nichnas habayta.
the fisherman dolls seller doctor entered home.
142

ma kara betmuna [[44]] ?
what happened in picture [[44]] ?
hu po. Hakof shechev u’mavri bebeyt cholim lebubot.
he {is} here. The monkey is laying and recovering in a hospital for dolls.
[Ani esh’al shuv et hashe’elot legabey kama mehatmunot].
[I will ask again the questions regarding some of the pictures]
ma kore batmuna hazo? [[17]]
what is happening 88 in this picture? [[17]]
ha’achbaroshim menasim lehotsi lakof et habgadim.
the rats are trying to take out the monkey’s cloths.
ma kore batmuna hazo? [[26]]
what is happening in this picture? [[26]]
hakipodim lokchim et hakof letiyul.
the hedgehogs are taking the monkey to a trip.
ma kore batmuna hazo? [[29]]
what is happening in this picture? [[29]]
ha’orev chotef et hakof mehakipodim.
the magpie kidnaps the monkey from the hedgehogs.
ma kore batmuna hazo? [[33]]
what is happening in this picture? [[33]]
hakof nofel derech nechil shel dvorim, ken shel tsra’ot.
the monkey is falling through — of bees —
ma kore batmuna hazo? [[19]]
what is happening in this picture? [[19]]
hakipod motsi et hakof mehame’ura shel ha’achbaroshim, veha’achbaroshim menasim lehitnaged.
the hedgehog is taking out the monkey of the cave of the rats, and the rats are trying to
object.
ma kore batmuna hazo? [[11]]
what is happening in this picture? [[11]]
ha’achbaroshim shegilu et hakof matchilim lerchreach oto.
88 note that I’ve change the question tense to present
143

the rats that discovered to monkey are starting to sniff him.
144

A.6 HA29
Telling the monkey story
[[0]] Hans vehakof she’ahav. . . (lo matsliach lezahot im ze kof tsa’atsu’a o amiti aval nelech al
ze shze kof amiti).
[[0]] Hans and the monkey he loved. . . ({I do} not manage to recognize whether it is a toy
monkey or a real monkey but {let us} go for it that it is a real monkey).
[[1]] Hans kibel ba’avar kof matana layomuledet. Kol kach ahav et hakof haze. . . bana lo
mita,vebayit, vekisa oto.
[[1]] Hans received in the past {a} monkey {as a} present to {his} birthday. {He} loved this
monkey so much, and built him {a} bed, and {a} house, and covered him {it}.
[[2]] lechol makom haya holech im hakof haze. Haya nose’a im ima shelo al ha’ofanayim, im
hakof, holech letayel bapark, im hakof, kol davar shehu haya ose, haya lokeach et hakof ito.
[[2]] To every place {wherever he went} {He} was going with this monkey. {He} was riding
with his mother on the bicycle, with the monkey, {He} was going to walk in the park with
the monkey, anything that he was doing, he was taking the monkey with him.
[[3]] hu haya shomer alav kol hazman. Lo haya noten le’af echad laga’at bo, vedo’eg shetamid
yihiye lo tov.
[[3]] He was watching him {it} all the time, {he} was not letting anybody to touch him {it},
and {was} ensuring that always he will be happy 89 .
[[4]] yom eshad kshehans ve’ima shelo tiylu bapark, hitchila sufa.
[[4]] One day, when hans and his mother walked in the park 90 a storm started.
[[5]] hans ve’ima shelo alu al ha’ofanayim vechazru maher habaita,
[[5]] Hans and his mother got on the bicycle and quickly returned back home.
[[6]] u’baderech, hakof nafal, vehans lo sam lev leze.
[[6]] And on the way, the monkey fell, and hans did not pay attention to that.
[[7]] kshehu higia habayta vesam lev sh’eyn lo et hakof, [[8]] hu meod hitatsev. . . ne’etsav.
[[7]] When he got home and payed attention that the he doesn’t have the monkey, [[8]] he
turned very sad. . . got sad 91 .
[[9]] ve’ima shelo sheyad’a shehu me’od me’od ohev at hakof haze, veyd’a sheyihiye lo kashe
bil’adav, htsi’a shehem yelchu lechapes oto lamrot sheyesh sufa bachuts, vekar.
89 this is not a literal translation but the important biit is the future conjugation
90 typicallly - was walking
91 playing with verb forms
145

[[9]] And his mother that knew that he loves this monkey very very 92 much, and knew that
{it} will be hard for him without him {it}, suggested that they will go to look for the monkey
despite {the fact} that there is a storm outside, and it is cold.
Kamuvan shehans hiskim. . . hitlabshu, chazru le’oto makom shehem hayu bo vehitchilu lechapes
et hakof.
Of course hans agreed. . . they got dressed, returned to the same place that they were at and
started to look for the monkey.
[[10]] Chipsu harbe, lo. . . klum.
[[10]] {They} searched a lot, no. . . nothing.
[[11]] (mistaber sheze kof tsa’atsu’a. . . beseder). Hakof nafal leraglo she lets chalul, shegaru
bo harbe achbarim, veha’achbarim hechelitu shehem me’amtsim et hakof, ve’osim mimeno.
. . mashehu. Techef negale ma ze hamashehu haze shehem osim mimeno.
[[11]] (Apparently it is a toy monky. . . ok). The monkey fell to the bottom of a CHALUL
tree, that many mice lived in, and the mice decided that they are adopting the monkey, and
are doing something out of him {it}. . . shortly we well find out what is this something that
they decided to make out of the monkey.
[[12]] gareru oto letoch ha’ets hachalul ,[[13]] vehitchilu lefarek oto.
[[12]] {They} dragged him {it} into the — tree, [[13]] and started to tear him apart LEFAREK
[[14]] hem lo hevinu bahatchala ma ze kof shehu. . . lo achil aval nikra. Az zehu, hitchilu
likro’a oto, le’at le’at, hitchilu im hazanav, [[15]] acharey shehem samu lev shehazanav nikra
hechelitu lechaber lo chazara et hazanav. . .
[[14]] They did not understand in the beginning what {is} this monkey that is. . . not eatable
but get torn up 93 . So, that’s it, {they} started to tear him {it}, slowly slowly, started with
the tail, [[15]] after they paid attention that the tail got torn they decided to connect the tail
back ti him {it}.
[[16]] Yom echad higia kipod levaker et ha’achbarim, [[17]] ha’achbarim dey hitbayshu shehem
hifshitu et hakof, lifney shehakipod hispik lehikanes hem hilbishu oto chazara bamichnasayim
shelo, shebe’etsem lezman katsar me’od haita hanadneda shelahem.
[[16]] One they {a} hedgehog arrived to visit the mice, [[17]] the mice got pretty ashamed
that they undressed the monkey, before the hedgehog managed to enter they dressed him {it
up} back in his {its} pants, that for a short while were their NADNEDA.
(ani lo mevin ma kore po. . . asur lehistakel hal’a. . . )
(I do not understand what is happening here... it is not allowed to look further. . . )
hem hilbishu et hakof, [[18]] vekshehakipod nisa lehikanes, [[19]] hem dachafu et hakof chazara
derech hachor, bishvil lachasom et hachor, velidchof et hakipod hachutsa.
92 repetition used to stress things like how much he loves him
93 check translation
146

They dressed the monkey, [[18]] and when the hedgehog tried to enter [[19]], they pushed the
monkey back through the hole, in order to block the hole, and push the hedgehog out.
[[20]] hakipod ra’a et hakof shenidchaf hachutsa derech hachor, pit’om ha’achbarim hifsiku
le’anyen oto.
[[20]] The hedgehog saw the monkey that is being pushed out through the hole, all of a sudden
the mice stopped to interest him {it}.
[[21]] ra’a kof kol kach nechmad, im zanav kashur bekesher, [[22]] hechelit lakachat oto habaita
velehavi oto layeladim shelo.
[[21]] {It} saw such {a} nice monkey, with tied tail, [[22]] {and} 94 decided to take him {it}
home and to bring him {it} to his {its} children.
[[23]] he’emis oto al hagav, vechazar lemishpachto veleyeladav 95
[[23]] {It} loaded him {it} on his back, and returned to his {its} family and children.
[[24]] hakipodonim haktanim me’od ahavu et hakof, afilu yashnu becheko, hitchamemu, vehishtamsh
bo letoaltam.
The small hedgehog loved the monkey very much, even slept in his — , turned warm 96 , and
used him {it} for their own good 97
[[25]] chuts milishon ito hem gam shichaku ito, kaftsu alav,[[26-27]] lakchu oto itam lekol
miney mekomot. . .
[[25]] Apart from sleeping {together} with him {it} they also played with him {it}, jumped
on him {it}, and took him {it} to all sorts of places. . .
[[28]] ad sheyom echad, higia orev bezman shehem sichaku im hakofif, ha’orev ra’a et hakofif
ve’me’od nidlak alav.
[[28]] Until one day, {a} magpie arrived at the time thay played with the little monkey, the
magpie saw the little monkey 98 and got very much turned on {by it} 99 .
[[29]] kmo sheyadu’a, kipodim me’od mefachadim me’orvim.
[[29]] As it is known, hedgehogs are very much afraid of magpies.
Ha’orev yarad yashar, hechelit lakachat et hakipod. . . et hakof, vehivriach et hakipodim, ve. . . [[30]]
sachav et hakof liken shelo.
The magpie went straight down, {ie} decided to take the hedgehog. . . the monkey, and scared
away the hedgehogs, and. . . [[30]] carried the monkey to his {its} nest.
[[31]] kmo sheyadu’a, orvim ohavim la’asof dvarim meanyenim, hosif oto le’osef hadvarim
hame’anyenim shelo baken.
94
borrowing the subject
95
this bit actually rhymes . . . :
96
hitpa’el
97
yes, it is awkward also in Hebrew to love someone and to use it but I guess everybody kind of do that.
98 the suffix indicates ’small’ , like je in dutch
99 using street language
147

[[31]] As it is known, magpies are loving {like} to collect interesting things, {it} added him
{it} his interesting things’ collection in the nest.
[[32]] acharaei shehu hevi oto laken hu histakel alav, bachan oto, lo kol kach hevin ma hu
yachol laasot chuts milefarek oto ktsat.
[[32]] After he {it} brought him {it} to the nest he {it} looked on {at} him {it}, examined
him {it}, did not quite know what to do with it except for tearing it apart a little.
Le’at le’at, hotsi lo ayin achat, vehosif ota laosef.
Slowly slowly, he pulled out one eye, and added it to the collection.
Acharei shehu hotsi lo ta’ayin amar, ”tov, lakachti ma she’ani rotse, chaval hu tofes harbe
makom, kof gadol, ani zorek oto, chaval al hazmal, eyn li ma la’asot ito”.
After he pulled out his eye he said. ”ok, I took what I want, too bad he {it} is taking a lot
of space, {a} big monkey, I am throwing it away 100 . CHAVAL AL HAZMAN ??!!? I do not
have anything to do with it.
[[33]] toch kedey shehakof tsanach, higiu charakim me’od muzarim ve’asu ito mashehu (elohim,
ma hem osim po? Eyn li musag).
[[33]] During the time that the monkey parachuted, very weird insects arrived and did something
with him {it} (god, what are they doing here? I have no idea).
Az hem higiu elav, sichaku ito ktsat baderech lemata, vegam lahem ktsat nim’as mimeno, az
hem zarku oto layam.
So they arrived to him {it}, played with him {it} on the way down, and they too got a little
tired 101 of him, so they threw him {it} to the sea.
[[34]] misken hakof, nafal letoch hamayim, kof tsa’atsu’a. . . .
[[34]] The poor monkey, {it} fell into the water, toy monkey. . . .
[[35]] maher me’od hitchil lispog mayim, kol hamiluy shelo hitmala, vehu hitchil litslol lama’amakim.
[[35]] Very quickly he {it} started to LISPOG water, all of his {its} stuffing got filled up, and
he started to dive to the — MAAMKIM,.
Kshehigia hakof lama’amakim, matsa et mekomo al gabey na’al kru’a, matsa sof sof et
menuchato, chashav hakof.
When {it} got to the — , found the monkey his place on top of a torn shoe. {it} found his
‘rest in peace’, thought the monkey.
Ad shehigia dag achzar. . .
Until a mean fish arrived . . .
[[36]] velo asa klum im hakof.
[[36]] And did nothing with the monkey.
100 again immediate intention !! not only boaz..
101 binyan nifal
148

[[37]] yom echad dayag zaken he’ela et hakof bechakato.
[[37]] One day {an} old fisherman caught the monkey in his hook. CHECK THIS
[[38]] histakel hadayag al hakof, “mmm..mizman lo tafasti mashehu me’anyen kol kach, bimkom
hadagim, aval ma, ani osif oto le’osef hadvarim hame’anyenim sheyesh li babayit.
[[38]] The fisherman looked at the monkey, “mmm. . . long time ago {for a long while} I did
not catch something so interesting, instead of the fish, but what, I will 102 put add it to the
interesting things collection that I have at home.
[[39]] lakach hadayag et hakof habaita,ve.. [[40]] hechelit letaken oto.
[[39]] The fisherman took the monkey home, and . . . [[40]] decided to fix it.
[[41]] hu tafar et hazanav hakaru’a shelo, shenikra al yedey ha’achbarim.
[[41]] — ADD
[[42]] Hu shataf oto kedey lehorid et kol halichluch shehitstaber alav bamayim, [[43]] asa lo fen,
permanent, permanent, taltalim. . .
[[42]] He washed him {it} in order to take off all the dirt that got-accumulated-around on him
{it} in the water, [[43]] made him —- ADD
[[44]] (vehu ne’elam li. . . eifo hakof? Bo nir’e mi motse ta’kof. o, matsanu ta’kof.) matsa lo
arisa, vehishkiv oto lishon.
[[44]] (And he disappered. . . where is the monkey? Let us see who finds the monkey, oh, {we}
found the monkey). {He} found a cradle for him {it}, and put him {it} to sleep in he cradle.
[[45]] acharei shehakof nach, vecvar nir’a harbe yoter tov, acharey hatipul, hu hechelit lehatsig
oto bechalon hara’ava.
[[45]] After the monkey rested, and already looked much better, after the treatment, he
decided to put him on his window.
Mistaber she’oto zaken, hu lo stam dayag, hu mechin bubot, vetsa’atsu’im, ve’amar “ze yihiye
ra’ayon nechmad lishmor oto. Ve’ulay mishehu yirtse oto pa’am”.
It turns out that the same old man is not just a fisherman, he makes dolls, and toys, and
{he} said “ it will be a nice idea to keep him {it}, and maybe someday someone will want
him {it}”.
[[46]] acharey mispar yamim, ka’asher higia hachoref, vehaya kar, yatsa hans letayel im imo
shuv, al hamizchelet, [[47]] u’barega shehu avar mul hachalon shel oto dayag, makaf, metaken
bubot, makaf, mechin bubot, hivchin bakof shelo.
[[46]] After a few days, when the winter arrived, and {it} was cold, hans went out to go on
a trip 103 with his mother again, on the MIZCHELET, [[47]] and at the moment he passed
across the window of that same fisherman, slash, dolls’ fixer, slash, dolls’ maker, {he} noticed
his monkey.
102 in the sense of ’let me’
103 cumbersome
149

[[48]] “ima ima” tsa’ak hans, “hine hakof sheli!”, [[49]] ve’ima shelo yad’a kama hu ohev et
hakof, amra lo “bo nikanes livdok ma efshar la’asot, me’eifo higia hakof lepo”.
[[48]] “mom mom”, shouted hans, “here is my monkey!”, [[49]] and his mother knew how
much he loves the monkey, told him “come on we will {let’s} enter to check what is it possible
to do {what can we do}. How did the monkey arrive here”.
[[50]] hans nigash lemocher habubot, ubikesh sheyar’e lo et hakof, hu adayin lo haya batuach
sheze hakof shelo. Hu meod ratsa sheze yihiye.
Hans approached the doll seller, and asked {him} that he will show {to show} him the monkey.
He still was not sure it is his monkey. He really wanted it to be.
[[51]] maher me’od ziha hans sheze hakof shelo, lakach oto bishtey yadav, chibek oto, vechazar
lihiyot me’ushar acharey sheharbe zman hu haya atsuv vehakof haya chaser lo.
Very quickly hans recognized that this is his monkey, took him with both of his hands, and
got back to being happy, after a long time in which he was sad and the monkey was missing
to him.
Hasof.
The end.
[[51]]: Retelling the story
Hans kibel leyom huladeto kof, kof tsa’atsu’a.
Hans got for his birthday {a} monkey, {a} toy monkey.
Hans ahav meod et hakof shelo, hu me’od da’ag lo, hu hechin lo mita vebayit, veda’ag shetamid
yihiye na’im lakof.
Hans loved his monkey very much, he took good care of him {it}, he prepared {a} bed and
{a} house for him, and always made sure that {things..} will be pleasant for the monkey.
Hu haya loke’ach oto ito lechol makom, hu haya loke’ach oto keshehaya yotse lately bapark. . .
He was taking him {it} with him everywhere, he was taking him {it} with him when he was
going to walk in the park.
Yom echad yatsa hans letayel bapark im imo al ha’ofanayim, higia lapark, sichek sham im
hachayot, shamar shehachyot lo yig’u bakof, vehegen alav.
One day went hans to trip in the park with his mother on the bicycle, got to the park, played
there with the animals, kept that the animals will not touch the monkey, and protected him
{it}.
Be’oto rega. . . achary kama zman hitchila se’ara ba. . . park, vehans ve’ima shelo alu maher al
ha’ofanayim vehecehlitu lachazor habaita.
At the same moment. . . after some time a storm started at . . . the park, and hans and his
mother quickly got on the bicycle and decided to return home.
150

Baderech hakof nafal lehans mehaofanayim, vehans lo sam lev.
On the way the monkey fell to hans off the bicycle, and hans did not pay attention.
Ve’az ka’asher higia hans habayta, sam lev hans shehakof lo nimtsa etslo. Hit’atsev me’od,
And then when hans arrived home, noticed hans that the moneky is 104 not at his possession.
{he} got very sad,
Imo yad’a kama hans ohev et hakof vehitsia sheyelchu lechapes et hakof.
His mother knew how much hans loves the monkey and suggested that they will go to look
for the monkey.
Hem chipsu velo matsu et hakof.
They searched and did not find the monkey.
Hakof nafal samuch legeza chalul shel ets, lachen hem lo ra’u oto.
The monkey fell close to an GEZA CHALUL of a tree, therefore they did not see it.
Chazru habayta, hans haya me’od atsuv.
{they} returned home, hans was very sad.
Betoch oto ets chalul, gara mishpacaha shel achbarim.
Inside the same empty tree lived a family of mice.
Ha’achbarim, ra’u et hakof, hechelitu, ligror oto letoch ha’ets hachalul, lir’ot ma hem yecholim
la’asot ito.
The mice, saw the monkey, {they} decided, to drag him {it} into the empty tree, to see what
they can do with him {it}.
Hem mashchu oto letoch ha’ets hachalul, vehitchilu lesachek ito.
The pulled him into the empty tree, and started to play with him {it}.
Davar risho, hem kar’u lo et hazanav.
First things, they torn up the tail to him.
Hem lo. . . maher me’od amru she: “chaval shekara lo ta’zanav, bo nechaber lo oto chazara”
They did not. . . very shortly they said that: “it is a pity that we torn up the tail to him, com
on {we} will 105 connect him 106 {it} back to him {it}.
Asu kesher bazanav, ve, avru lesachek hal’a.
Made a tie in the tail, and, moved on to play {more}.
Horidu lo et hamichnasayim, ve’asu mehem nadneda.
{they} took off his pants to him, and made a NADNEDA out of them.
104 the meaning of exist, estar in spanish
105 in the meaning of let’s
106 yes, the tail is him
151

Hem sichaku al hanadneda ad sheyom echad higia kipod leyad ha’ets.
They played with the —- until one day {a} hedgehog arrived next to the tree.
Hem kol kach hitbayshu shehem hifshitu lo et hamichnasayim, az hem hilbishu oto chazara.
They were so ashamed 107 that they undressed him {took off} the pants , so they dressed him
{it} back.
Kshehem ra’u shehakipod menase lehikanes, hem hechelitu lidchof et ha. . . et hakipod (hakof)
velachasom ito et hachor shel ha’ets.
When they saw that the hedgehog is trying to enter, they decided to push the . . . the
hedgehog (the monkey) and to block with him {it} the hole of the tree.
Ka’asher hakipod ra’a et hakof shemetsits lo mitoch hachor sheba’ets, hechelit lakachat oto,
When the hedgehog saw the monkey that is pimping from inside the hole that is in the tree,
{it} decided to take him {it}.
Amar, “eize kof nechmad, ulay ani avi oto habayta, layeladim sheli”
{it} said “what a nice monkey maybe I will take it home, to my children”.
He’emis hakipod et hakof al hagav, vechazar ito habayta.
Loaded the hedgehog the monkey on the back, and returned home with him {it}.
Hayeladim shel hakipod ahavu me’od et ha. . . hakof, hem ahavu oto kol kach shehem afilu
yashnu becheko,
The children of the hedgehog loved the. . . the monkey very much. They loved him {it} so
that they even slept in his CHEK.
Hem. . . acharey shehem hit’oreru hem himshichu lesachek hem kaftsu al hakof, hem lakchu
oto itam letiyulim,
They. . . after they woke up they continued to play they jumped on the monkey, they took
him {it} to trips,
ad sheyom echad orev hivchin bahem mesachakim im hakof.
Until one they {a} magpie noticed them playing with the monkey.
Ha’orev ra’a et hakof ve’amar: “hmm, kof caze ani me’od rotse”.
The magpies saw the monkey and said: “hmm {a} monkey like that I want very much”.
Kmo sheyadu’a kipodim mefachadim me’orvim, eich sheha’orev yarad vehifchid et hakipodim,
hem barchu vehish’iru et hakof la’orev.
As it is known hedgehogs are scared of magpies, {as soon} as the magpie went down and
scared away the hedgehogs, they escaped and left the monkey to the magpie.
Ha’orev lakach et hakof bamakor shelo, vehevi oto laken shelo.
The magpie took the monkey in his MAKOR, and broght him {it} to his nest.
107 interesting - binyan hitpael for a state ashamed
152

Kmo sheyadua, orvim ohavim la’asof kol miney dvarim bakinim shelahem, amar, “ulay ani
osif et hakof haze la’osef sheli”.
As it is known, magpies love to collect all sorts of things in their nests, {it} said, “maybe I
will add the monkey to my collection”.
Kshehu higia laken vera’a shehakipod. . . shehakof gadol miday, hechelit lakachat rak et ha’ayin
shel hakof.
When he {it} arrived to the nest and saw that the hedgehog. . . the monkey {is} too big, {it}
decided to take only the eye of the monkey.
Az hu mashach et ha’ayin shel hakof, hosif ota la’osef shelo, vezarak et hakof mehaken.
So he {it} pulled the eye off the monkey, added her {it} to his {its} collection, and threw the
monkey off the nest.
Bederech, eichshsehu pagash hakipod. . . ehh hakof. . . kol miney charakim muzarim (sheani lo
mevin eich hem kshurim lasipur aval hem hayu sham.) vehakof nafal lamayim.
On the way, met the hedgehog. . . ehh the monkey all sorts of wired insects (that I do not
know how the are connected to the story but they were there.), and the monkey fell into the
water.
Bahatchala hu ktsat tsaf, le’at le’at hitchil lispog mayim, veshaka letachtit ha’agam. . . nachal. . . agam.
In the beginning he {it} TSAF a little bit, slowly slowly {it} started to soak water, and drawn
to the bottom of the lake. . . river. . . lake.
Hakof shaka, shaka, ad shehigia lakarka’it u’matsa et menuchato al gabey na’al kru’a.
The monkey drawn, drawn, until {it} reached the bottom and found his peace on top on a
torn shoe.
Ad sheyom echad higia dayag zaken, shehu be’etsem mechin. . . eh. . . sheyoter me’uchar neda
shehu gam mechin bubot u’metaken bubot, vehe’ela et hakof bechakato.
Until one day arrived {an} old fisherman, that he is actually. . . eh.. that later we will know
that he {is} also {a} doll maker and also {a} doll repairator, and raised 108 the monkey.
Histakel hadayag al hakof ve’amar, “nechmad, ulay natsliach la’asot mize mashehu”, vepashut
lakash et hakof lebeyto.
Looked the fisherman at the monkey and said, “nice, maybe we will manage to make something
out of it”, and simply took it to his home.
Higia habayta, davar rishon hut afar lakof et hazanav, hu shataf oto mehalichluch shek hanahar,
ve’asa lo fen vetaltalim. . . .
{He} arrived home, first thing he sew the tail to the monkey, he washed {off} him the dirt of
the river, and ASA LO FEN ????
Hu hishkiv et hakof betohc arisa shehayta lo, venatan lakof lehit’oshesh.
108 caught? Worth while trying to re-translate
153

He layed down the monkey in a cradle that he had, and let the monkey to recover.
Acharey mispar yamim hechelit lehatsig et hakof bechalon hara’ava shelo, vesham hu nish’ar
ktsat, ad hachoref.
After {s} few days, {he} decided to present the monkey on his window, and there he stayed
a bit, until the winter.
Higia hachoref, yarad sheleg, hans yatsa im imo letayel im hamizchelet, toch kedey shehu
mesachek hu ra’a et hakof shelo bechalon hara’ava.
The winter arrived, snow drifted down, hans went out with his mother to tour with the —,
during the time he is playing, he saw his monkey in the window.
Be’oto rega hu lo haya batuach sheze hakof shelo, az hu tsa’ak “ima ima hakof sheli!”.
At the same moment we was not sure that this is his monkey, so he shouted “mom mom my
monky!”.
Ima shelo sheyad’a kama hu ohev et hakof haze vehu lo hitsliach lehit’oshesh mehapreda
hakodemet mehakof, miyad lakcah et hans bayad vehem nichnesu lachanut.
His mother who knew how much he loves thi monkey and {that} he did not manage to recover
from the previous PREDA with the monkey, immediately took hans in his hand and they
entered the store.
Hans nigash lemocher habubot shehu gam dayag shehu gam metaken bubot, ubikesh mimeno
lir’ot et hakof.
Hans approached the doll seller who is also a fisherman who is also a doll reparator, and asked
him to see {show him} the monkey.
Miyad kshekibel hans et hakof iha sheze hakof shelo, lakach oto, chibek oto, vehem chayu
be’osher ve’osher ad etsem hayom haze.
Immediately when hans got the monkey he recognize that this is his monkey, took him {it},
hugged him {it}. And they lived happily ever after 109
Hasof.
The end.
Answering questions
[[51]]ma kara lakof basipur?
[[51]] what happened to the monkey in the story?
hakof avar harpatka’a
the mokey went through an experience.
ha’im hakof avad?
109 not literal but definitely the same common used closing of fairy tales
154

Had the monkey been lost 110 ?
ken.
yes.
ha’im hakof ne’ebad?
Did the monkey get lost?
lo.
no.
lama lo?
why not?
ki bishvil shehakof yihiye ‘ne’ebad’ hu tsarich shetihiye lo eizeshehi yecholet lishlot beze, vehu
lo, hu buba.
because in order for the monkey to be ‘get lost’ he needs to have some ability to control it,
and he does not, he is a doll.
ha’im hayeled ibed et hakof?
Did the kid loose the monkey?
ken.
yes.
ha’im hakof halach le’ibud?
Did the monkey ‘went to lostness’ 111 ?
lo, hu lo halach le’ibud, od pa’am, ze savil veze pa’il.
No, it didn’t ‘go to lostness’ again, this is passive and this is active.
mikol haefsharuyot, hakof avad, hakof ne’ebad, hayeled ibed et hakof, vehakof
halach le’ibud ma hachi mat’im latmuna bitshuva lashe’ela ma kara lakof?
From all options . . . what is the most appropriate answer to the question what
happened to the monke with respect to the picture?
hayeled ibed et hakof.
the kid lost the monkey.
Ma ha’achbarim asu lakof?
what did the mice do to the monkey?
bahatchala hem perku oto, achar cach hem nisu lishmor oto shalem yoter, hem sichaku.
110 I try to find the translation that conceptually fit the question
111 weird spoken nominalization
155

At the beginning they took him apart, later they tried to keep him more complete. They
played.
ha’im ha’achbarim hilbishu et hakof bechazara?
Did the mice dress the monkey back?
ken.
yes.
ha’im ha’achbarim hitchilu lehalbish et hakof bechazara?
Did the mice start to dress the monkey back?
ken.
yes.
ha’im ha’achbarim siymu lehalbish et hakof bechazara?
Did the mice finish to dress the monkey back?
ken.
yes.
ha’im ha’achbarim hifsiku lehalbish et hakof bechazara?
Did the mice stop to dress the monkey back?
ze shehem symu ze lahafsik.
The fact that they completed is {in fact} to stop.
ma asta hatsipor lakof?
what did the bird do to the monkey?
talsha ayin mehakof.
pulled out {an} eye off the monkey.
ha’im ha’tsipor hotsia lakof et haeynayim?
Did the magpie pulled out the monkey’s eyes?
achat.
one.
ha’im ha’tsipor hitchilan lehotsia lakof et haeynayim?
Did the magpie started to pull out the monkey’s eyes?
ken.
yes.
ha’im ha’tsipor hifsika lehotsia lakof et haeynayim?
Did the magpie stopped to pull out the monkey’s eyes?
156

ken.
yes.
ha’im ha’tsipor siyma lehotsia lakof et haeynayim?
Did the magpie finished to pull out the monkey’s eyes?
lo.
no.
ma asa hadoktor lakof?
what did the doctor do to the monkey?
hadoctor tiken et hakof, hosif lo. . . tiken lo et hazanav,hechezir lo ayin, nika oto, yibesh
oto. . . ..
The doctor fixed the monkey. Added to him. . . fixed his tail, returned the eye, cleaned it,
dried it. . . .
ha’im hadoctor hitchil letaken et hakof?
Did the doctor start to fix the monkey?
ken.
yes.
ha’im hadoctor hifsik letaken et hakof?
Did the doctor stopped to fix the monkey?
lo.
no.
ha’im hadoctor siyem letaken et hakof?
Did the doctor finish to fix the monkey?
ken.
yes.
(ma hatochen shel hatmunot haba’aot bacontext shel hasipur)
(what is the content of the following pictures in the context of the story?)
tmuna [[4]]?
picture [[4]]?
pit’om hitchila sufa
suddenly a storm started.
tmuna [[8]]?
picture [[8]]?
157

hans hitatsev me’od
hans turned very sad.
tmuna [[11]]?
picture [[11]]?
ha’achbarim gareru et hakof letoch ha’ets hachalul.
the mice dragged the monkey into the empty tree.
tmuna [[14]]?
picture [[14]]?
oops, nikra hazanav shel hakof.
oops, the tail of the monkey got torn up.
tmuna [[18]]?
picture [[18]]?
ha’kipod hetsits mehachor shel ha’ets hachalul.
the hedgehog pimped from the hole of the empty tree.
tmuna [[19]]?
picture [[19]]?
ha’achbarim chasmu et hachor shel ha’ets be’ezrat hakof.
the mice blocked the hole of the tree with the monkey.
tmuna [[17]]?
picture [[17]]?
ha’achbarim hilbishu et hakof.
the mice dressed the monkey.
tmuna [[23]]?
picture [[23]]?
aba kipod hevi et hakof liyeladav.
father hedgehog brought the monkey to his children.
tmuna [[26]]?
picture [[26]]?
hakipodim yots’im letayel im hakof.
the hedgehogs are going out to tour with the monkey.
tmuna [[29]]?
158

picture [[29]]?
hivriach ha’orev et hakipodim.
the magpie scared away the the hedgehogs.
tmuna [[31]]?
picture [[31]]?
talash ha’orev et eino shel hakof.
the magpie pulled out the monkey’s eye.
tmuna [[34]]?
picture [[34]]?
hakof nafal letoch ha’agam.
he fell into the lake.
tmuna [[39]]?
picture [[39]]?
higia hadayag lebeyto.
the fisherman arrived to his home.
tmuna [[41]]?
picture [[41]]?
tafar hadoctor et znavo shel hakof.
the doctor sowed the monkey’s tail.
tmuna [[44]]?
picture [[44]]?
hishciv oto lishon bamita shematsa lo.
{he} put him to sleep in a bed he found for him.
tmuna [[51]]?
picture [[51]]?
vehem chayu be’osher ve’osher ad etsem hayom haze.
and they lived happily ever after.
letochen hatmuna hazot [[17]] eize mishpat nir’a lecha yoter mat’im - ha’achbarim
hilbishu et hakof bechazara o ha’achbarim malbishim et hakof bechazara?
For the content of this picture [[17]] what sentences seem to you as more appropriate
- the mice dressed the monkey back or the mice are dressing the monkey
back?
159

hilbishu. Im ze sipur ze avar kamuvan.
dressed. If this is a story than {choose} past of course.
latmuna hazot [[11]] ha’achabarim gorerim et hakof o gareru et hakof ?
for this picture [[11]] the mice are dragging the monkey or dragged the monkey?
gareru, shuv, avar.
dragged, again, past.
latmuna hazot [[32]] ha’orev hotsi lakof et haeynayim o motsi lakof et haeinayim?
for this picture [[32]] the magpie pulled out the monkey’s eyes or is pulling out
the monkey’s eyes?
talash ha’orev et eyno, avar od pa’am.
the magpie pulled out his eye, past, again.
behanacha shehamatara hayta lehotsi lo et shtey haeynayim, ha’im ha’orev hotsi
lakof et haeynayim o motsi lakof et haeynayim?
given the assumption that the goal is to pull out both eyes, did the magpie ‘pulled
out the monkey’s eyes’ or ‘is pulling out the monkey’s eyes’ ?
hu hitchil lehotsi et haeynayim.
he started to pull out the monkey’s eyes.
ha’im ha’orev hotsi lakof et haeynayim?
did the magpie pull out the monkey’s eyes?
lo.
no.
160

Appendix B
Book Plot
Table B.1 shows the book plot, as an objective description picture by picture.
161

Picture Description
[[1]] The boy takes the monkey, the mother waits outside with the bicycle
[[2]] The mother, the boy and the monkey ride the bicycle
[[3]] The mother, the boy and the monkey feed the ducks in the park
[[4]] The mother, the boy and the monkey see that storm clouds are coming by
[[5]] The mother, the boy and the monkey ride the bicycle in the rain
[[6]] The monkey falls off the bicycle
[[7]] The boy finds that the monkey’s bed is empty
[[8]] The boy cries
[[9]] The mother and the boy walk in the park in the rain
[[10]] The monkey is hidden under a tree, the mother and child are further away
[[11]] Mice pull the monkey into a hole
[[12]] Mice drag the monkey in the hole
[[13]] Mice pull the monkey’s clothes and tail
[[14]] Mice stare at the broken tail
[[15]] Some mice tie the tail, others play with the cloth
[[16]] A hedgehog walks by the mice’s tree
[[17]] The mice dress the monkey, a hedgehog peeks in
[[18]] The hedgehog pushes his head inside the mice’s hole
[[19]] The mice push the monkey through the hole
[[20]] The hedgehog almost steps on the monkey’s head
[[21]] The hedgehog grabs the monkey by the head
[[22]] The hedgehog carries the monkey on its back and walks
[[23]] the hedgehog and the monkey meet a hedgehog family
[[24]] The monkey sleeps with the baby hedgehogs
[[25]] The hedgehogs jump on the monkey
[[26]] The baby hedgehogs follow their parents and carry the monkey
[[27]] The hedgehogs stop, refer towards an unknown object
[[28]] A magpie observes the hedgehogs and the monkey
[[29]] The magpie holds one leg on the monkey, the other towards a runaway hedghog
[[30]] The magpie carries the monkey in the air
[[31]] A nest full of artificial bodyparts (eyes, teeth)
[[32]] The magpie pulls one of the monkey’s eyes
[[33]] The monkey falls, surrounded by bees
[[34]] The monkey ‘splashes’ into the water
[[35]] The monkey is at the bottom of a lake full of other water animals
[[36]] A hook comes into the water
[[37]] The monkey is caught by the hook
[[38]] A fisherman stares at the monkey
[[39]] The fisherman arrives to his house — it looks like a toy hospital
[[40]] The fisherman enters with the monkey
[[41]] He (fisherman?) fixes the monkey’s tail
[[42]] He washes the monkey in the bath tub
[[43]] He dries the monkey with a drier
[[44]] The monkey is in bed in a room packed with toys and toy parts
[[45]] The fisherman holds the monkey, approaches the display window
[[46]] The monkey is on the zebra in the display, the mother and the boy arrive with a sled
[[47]]
[[48]]
The boy on the sled looks towards the display
162
The boy reaches out for the monkey
[[49]] The boy and the mother are at the door
[[50]] The boy speaks to the fisherman, pointing at the monkey
[[51]] The boy hugs monkey

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