`binyanim ba'avir': An investigation of Aspect Semantics in Modern Hebrew Reut Tsarfaty Abstract: `binyanim ba'avir' An investigation of Aspect Semantics in Modern Hebrew Reut Tsarfaty Abstract: This thesis summarizes an attempt to decompose `Hebrew aspect' and construct aspectual meanings by virtue of the semantic contributions of morphological templates. The proposed account is not the only possible answer to these questions, and by no means is this the end of the story. A different way in which this thesis can be thought of is as an attempt to `break' traditional associative relations and encourage considering new ones. In the Hebrew linguistic arena, I argue against the `Hebrew aspect equals lexical aspect' equation. By this I hope to have encouraged a doubled-dimension investigation of Hebrew aspect as proposed by general linguistic theory and reflected typologically in many other language. Alongside these aspectual claims I attempted to show supporting evidence for a stronger connection between the contributions of morphological templates and the meanings of verbs derived from them. In the general linguistic arena, I advocate stronger (bi-directional) relations between semantic properties of events and the thematic roles of their participants. Also, I suggest a weaker connection between `resulting change of state' and an event's `telicity'. These suggestions have been explored before (in [10] and [55] respectively), however, I believe that the results of this work provide supporting evidence for these directions of investigation. In a cross-linguistic arena, I suggest that the contribution of specific constructions in different languages (not necessarily `grammatical tenses') might have ramifications for an aspectual investigation. An example for this is the suggestion to re-examine the connection between causative constructions and event structure as evident in the discussion of the causative template Hiphil (section 6.3). A crosslinguistic investigation of causative constructions may shed some more light on this matter. Finally, I hope to have exemplified the importance of a parallel empirical evaluation of a theoretical investigation of linguistic forms by means of identifying patterns of real language use and possible developmental trends in the functions these linguistic forms are meant to serve. Such a parallel investigation is more likely to yield successful results with respect to linguistic adequacy as well as cognitive plausibility of the proposed account.