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
Agreement 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.
Published online: 18 March 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.210.13mel
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.210.13mel
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