Chapter published in:
Usage-Based Studies in Modern Hebrew: Background, Morpho-lexicon, and SyntaxEdited by Ruth A. Berman
[Studies in Language Companion Series 210] 2020
► pp. 421–464
Chapter 12Agreement alternations in Modern Hebrew
Nurit Melnik | The Open University of Israel
Agreement is a type of relationship between two linguistic elements, often
characterized as an asymmetric relationship where one element, the
controller, determines the agreement features of another, the
target, within a particular syntactic domain. Although according to
prescriptive grammars, agreement relationships are stable and deterministic, usage-based
data reveal considerable variation. Building on data retrieved from
heTenTen 2014, a billion-token web-crawled Hebrew corpus, we present and
discuss two types of agreement alternations: (1) agreement targets which alternate between exhibiting feminine vs. masculine
gender, full vs. default agreement, and formal vs. semantic agreement, and (2) controller competition, where an agreement
target is controlled by one of two possible controllers. Naturally, this perspective on
agreement highlights the exceptions and overlooks the regularities, yet we argue that an
examination of such alternations provides clues as to the true nature of the agreement
relation.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Feminine–masculine alternations
- 2.1Plural marking
- 2.2Dual–plural marking
- 2.3Numerals and gender agreement
- 2.3.1Preliminary definitions
- 2.3.2Absolute numeric quantifiers
- 2.3.3Construct numeric quantifiers
- 2.3.4Single nouns with numeric quantifiers
- 2.4Plurals and gender agreement
- 2.4.1Subject–verb agreement with plural–feminine nouns
- 2.5Gender agreement: Summary
- 3.Personal–impersonal alternations
- 3.1Verb-initial clauses
- 3.2The existential yeš
- 3.3The question-word / quantifier eyze
- 3.4Personal-impersonal agreement: Summary
- 4.Form/meaning alternations
- 4.1Place names
- 4.2Names of firms
- 4.3Agreement variations with the noun bealim ‘owner(s)’
- 4.4Summary
- 5.Controller alternations
- 5.1Construct state NPs
- Partitives
- 5.2The copular construction
- 5.2.1Copula agreement alternations
- 5.2.2Partitives and copulas
- 5.1Construct state NPs
- 6.Conclusions
-
Notes -
References
Published online: 18 March 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.210.13mel
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.210.13mel
References
Baroni, Marco, Bernardini, Sylvia, Ferraresi, Adriano & Zanchetta, Eros
Berman, Ruth A.
Danon, Gabi
Deutsch, Avital & Dank, Maya
Gonen, Einat & Rubinstein, Doron
Kilgarriff, Adam, Smrz, Pavel, Rychly, Pavel & Tugwell, David
Kuzar, Ron
Lambrecht, Knud
Landau, Idan
Meir, Irit
Melnik, Nurit
Netz, Hadar & Kuzar, Ron
Ravid, Dorit
Ravid, Dorit & Schiff, Rachel
Ritter, Elizabeth
Schwarzwald, Ora Rodrigue
1996 milim besiyomet -ayim bʕivrit: curatan, yciratan wšimušeyhen (Words with +ayim endings in Hebrew). In Studies in Hebrew and Jewish Languages Presented to Shlomo Morag, Moshe Bar-Asher (ed.), 341358. Jerusalem: The Center for Jewish Languages and Literature, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Bialik Institute.
Steele, Susan
Toury, Gideon
Wechsler, Stephen & Zlatić, Larisa
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Shor, Leon
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 01 april 2022. 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.