Enabling and allowing in Hebrew
A usage-based construction grammar account
Three-Argument Dative constructions in Hebrew include two sub constructions, each with a specific form-meaning correlation, a specific usage pattern, and a particular discursive context. Syntactically, the two sub-constructions differ in that the THEME argument can be either (i) a noun phrase, or (ii) an infinitival predicate. In particular, the verb natan ‘give’ represents a prototypical construal in both sub-constructions. That is, with a NP THEME argument the verb natan ‘give’ has its literal meaning. With an infinitival THEME argument, however, the verb has the meaning of ‘allow, enable.’ Analyzing corpus data of the Infinitival complement Construction (ii), I account for these uses of the verb natan ‘give’ in a Usage-Based Construction Grammar perspective (Bybee, 2010). Utilizing the exploratory statistics techniques of Multidimensional Scaling (Borg and Groenen, 2005), Multiple Correspondence Analysis (Greenacre, 2010), and Hierarchical Classification on Principal Components (Husson et al., 2011) on corpus data, I show that multiple factors play a role in structuring an Argument Structure Construction. Furthermore, based on the bottom-up statistical analysis I argue that the verb’s morphological paradigm is one of the main cues for interpreting the relevant event frame and Dative participant roles in Hebrew.
References
Abbot-Smith, Kirsten & Tomasello, Michael
2006 Exemplar-learning and schematization in a usage-based account of syntactic acquisition.
The Linguistic Review 23(3): 275–290.
Ariel, Mira
2008 Pragmatics and Grammar. Cambridge: CUP.
Borg, Ingwer & Groenen, Patrick J.F
2005 Modern Multidimensional Scaling: Theory and Applications, 2nd edn. Berlin: Springer.
Bybee, Joan L
2006 From usage to grammar: The mind’s response to repetition.
Language 82(4): 529–551.
Bybee, Joan L
2010 Language, Usage and Cognition. Cambridge: CUP.
Bybee, Joan L. & Eddington, David
2006 A usage-based approach to Spanish verbs of ‘becoming’.
Language 82(2): 323–355.
Cox, Trevor F. & Cox, Michael A.A
2001 Multidimensional Scaling, 2nd edn. Boca Raton FL: Chapman & Hall.
Croft, William
2001 Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: OUP.
Dattner, Elitzur
In progress.
Mapping Hebrew Dative Constructions. PhD dissertation, Tel Aviv University.
Diessel, Holger
2004 The Acquisition of Complex Sentences. Cambridge: CUP.
Fillmore, Charles J., Kay, Paul & O’Connor, Mary Catherine
1988 Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions: The case of ‘let alone’.
Language 64(4): 501–538.
Gahl, Susanne & Yu, Alan C.L
2006 Introduction to the special issue on exemplar-based models in linguistics.
The Linguistic Review 23(3): 213–216.
[URL] DOI:
Goldberg, Adele E
1995 Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.
Goldberg, Adele E
2003 Constructions: A new theoretical approach to language.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7(5): 219–224.
Goldberg, Adele E
2005b Constructions, lexical semantics, and the correspondence principle. In
The Syntax of Aspect: Deriving Thematic and Aspectual Interpretation,
Nomi
Erteschik-Shir &
Tova Rapoport (eds). Oxford: OUP.
Goldberg, Adele E
2006 Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: OUP.
Goldberg, Adele E. & Jackendoff, Ray
2004 The English resultative as a family of constructions.
Language 80(3): 532–568.
Greenacre, Michael
2010 Correspondence Analysis in Practice, 2nd edn. Boca Raton FL: Chapman and Hall/CRC.
Greenacre, Michael & Blasius, Jörg
2006 Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Related Methods. Boca Raton FL: Chapman & Hall/CRC.
Gries, Stefan Thomas
2009 Quantitative Corpus Linguistics With R: A Practical Introduction. New York NY: Routledge.
Hopper, Paul J. & Thompson, Sandra A
1980 Transitivity in Grammar and Discourse.
Language 56(2): 251–299.
Husson, François, Lê, Sébastien & Pagès, Jérôme
2011.
Exploratory Multivariate Analysis by Example Using R. Boca Raton FL: Chapman & Hall/CRC.
Husson, Francois, Josse, Julie, Lê, Sébastien et al.
2013 FactoMineR: Multivariate Exploratory Data Analysis and Data Mining with R, version 1.25 [URL]
Kay, Paul
1997 Words and the Grammar of Context. Stanford CA: CSLI.
Kay, Paul & Fillmore, Charles J
1999 Grammatical constructions and linguistic generalizations: The what’s X doing Y? construction.
Language 75(1): 1–33.
Nenadic, Oleg & Greenacre, Michael
2007 Correspondence Analysis in R, with two and three-dimensional graphics: The ca package.
Journal of Statistical Software 20(3): 1–13.
[URL]
R Core Team
2013,
R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna.
[URL]
Rencher, Alvin
2012 Methods of Multivariate Analysis. Hoboken NJ: Wiley.
Wedel, Andrew B
2006 Exemplar models, evolution and language change.
The Linguistic Review 23(3): 247–274.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Dattner, Elitzur
2019.
The Hebrew dative: Usage patterns as discourse profile constructions.
Linguistics 57:5
► pp. 1073 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.