Asserting One's Existence in Modern Hebrew. A Saussurian-Based Analysis of the Domain of Attention is Selected 'Existentials'

This paper presents a Saussurian based, functionally oriented, semantic analysis to account for the distribution of the Hebrew 'existential' particle yes and its so-called 'pronomial' or 'bound' forms yeśn-o,a,am,an. We will postulate a meaning (signifié) for each form and show how the FOCUSSER meaning postulated for the so-called 'pronomial' forms can explain the distribution of these forms in 'existential', 'locative', 'possessive', 'impersonal', 'nominal', and 'verbal' or 'verboid' constructions as they occur in spoken and written discourse in context.