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. 465–506
Transitivity and valence
Rivka Halevy | The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The study explores a range of transitive constructions of varying
prototypicality in Modern Hebrew (MH) referring to causal and non-causal events, including
complex predicates, semi-transitive and lexicalized constructions, with transitivity
analyzed as a morpho-syntactic category rather than a semantic concept. The chapter
describes various types of alternations and variations in case-frame and argument structure
in MH transitive constructions, noting the growing tendency towards labile alternation
(ambitransitivity), particularly in the prototypical causative morphological pattern of the
hif’il verb-template (e.g., hilbin ‘whiten’ serves both
as causative ‘make white’ and inchoative ‘become white’). In such cases, a
change in the valence-frame of the verb does not necessarily involve change in the
verb-morphology, yielding the claim that transitivity in MH does not depend exclusively on
the semantic frame or morpho-phonological nature of the verb-pattern, but instead on the
overall syntactic properties of the construction, which in turn is dependent on discourse
requirements. Avoidance in discourse of the core O (object) argument is shown to occur even
in highly transitive constructions, in which reader-hearers resolve the unrealized argument
by context-based inferences and/or based on their communicative competence in conversational
discourse.
Published online: 18 March 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.210.14hal
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.210.14hal
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