The Emergence of Pa`al-Based Future Perfect Constructions in Contemporary Hebrew

I will argue that new Future Perfect constructions based on past tense forms (pa’al) are now emerging in Hebrew and address two research questions:

• How do these constructions differ from Hebrew’s yif’al based counterparts?
• What are the motivations for the seemingly counter-intuitive choice of pa’al?

The Future Resultative employs pa’al to denote a future state ensuing from a previous action. xasaxta in ‎(1) conveys the future state of having saved 300 shekels (due to a future purchase). By contrast, Hebrew’s future tense ‎(2) denotes a future event without a resultative construal:

1. ha-mexir ecle-nu: 900. xasaxta: 300(Mobile Website)

DEF-price at-1.PL 900 save.PST.2.SG.M 300

‘Our price: 900. Your saving will be: 300’

2. nipagesh maxar

meet.FUT.1.PL tomorrow

‘We will meet tomorrow’

The Military Imperative consists of second person pa’al and a temporal upper-bound. It requires that the addressee shall be in a future state of already having executed the request ‎(3), unlike the traditional imperative mood ‎(4), which merely asserts the request:

3. daka hikaftem ta-ma’ahal!

minute encircle.PST.2.PL.M ACC.DEF-camp

‘Be in a state of having run around the camp in a minute!’

4. hakifu ta-ma’ahal!

encircle.IMPERATIVE.2.PL ACC.DEF-camp

‘Run around the camp!’

I argue that the above constructions are manifestations of an emerging Future Perfect since they maintain the semantic relation E-R & S-R (Reichenbach 1947). The ensuing future state serves as the point of reference R from which the event E is viewed. The choice of pa’al is motivated as well: it reflects the anteriority of E to R iconically.