אז מה אומרים בכפר כנא? 'היה עוזר לו' או 'עזר לו'?

A narrative reconstructs the temporal organization of events along a timeline, as formulated by the narrator. Temporality in a narrative text includes the relations between narrative events as consecutive, posterior, anterior or simultaneous, as well as)im(perfective or progressive. In addition to basic plotline tenses, narrative events maybe foregrounded or backgrounded via language-specific uses of tense. In the case of Arabic, however, tense is intrinsically intertwined with aspect and mood. In Palestinian dialects two basic verbal conjugations are used in narrative: faʕal for a completed)perfective( event and jifʕal for an incomplete )imperfective( event. The latter, however,is usually subjunctive in mood, unless prefixed by the indicative morpheme b-.In the present study we investigated the functions and interaction of these three forms in the North Palestinian dialect of Kafr Kanna, in a corpus of narrative texts produced by ten adults. Each narrated the well-known 'Frog Story', used in many cross-linguistic studies on narrative production and development; this was followed by a personal experience story, narrated by each of our informants. We then performed both qualitative and quantitative analyses, and demonstrated characteristic functions of the verbal forms in the two narrative sub-genres. A sexpected, the perfective tense outranked the imperfective in both tasks; but interestingly, the gap between the perfective and imperfective was greater in the personal experience texts. We explained this as due to the increased need, in the personal stories, for evaluation, typically encoded in imperfective forms. Differences in frequency between the two imperfective forms were also found and explainedas due to the nature of the tasks. The clinical implications found, especially in the bilingual Israeli context, include reference to a significant typological difference between Arabic and Hebrew: while the former has a progressive tense, the latter does not.