Existential Particles in Modern Hebrew and Standard Arabic

Modern Hebrew and Standard Arabic have similar copular clauses but differ with respect to existential and possessive constructions: Modern Hebrew surfaces with an existential particle while Standard Arabic does not. The aim of the present analysis is to account for this difference. Assuming that C contains two uninterpretable features in this type of constructions: uT and uLoc, I will claim that that the form the existential particle takes at Spell-out is a consequence of the morphosyntactic representation of tense.