The cyclic nature of negation: From implicit to explicit. The case of Hebrew Bilti (‘not’)

Ruti Bardenstein
Ben-Gurion University | Shenkar College
Abstract

The Hebrew negation adverbial bilti ‘not’ seems to function very differently in Biblical Hebrew than it does in Contemporary Hebrew. This paper addresses this difference and discusses its evolution. The main question addressed in this paper is: How has Hebrew bilti, originally an exceptive marker (with sentential scoping), ended up functioning solely as a privative in contemporary Hebrew? First, this paper argues that the biblical usage of bilti was expanded and turned into a polyfunctional (or ‘polysemous’) item. This happened via a constructionalization process which led to grammatical changes (‘grammaticalization’): The initially implicated negation (via a generalized implicature) turned explicit (semantic). In addition, in Hebrew’s later periods, the usage of bilti was narrowed and it became a privative. Thus, firstly, a pragmatically motivated path of constructionalization of bilti in Biblical Hebrew is suggested. That is, the “pragmatic negation” that arose via a generalized implicature shifted to the semantic level (performing semantic negation, explicit negation). Secondly, bilti’s functions in post-biblical Hebrew periods are outlined, tracing its narrowing functions until its fixation in Contemporary Hebrew as a privative.

Keywords:
Publication history

Date received: 20 November 2021

Date accepted: 7 September 2022

Published online: 5 April 2023

Table of contents

The Hebrew bilti has not received much attention in linguistic literature. However, Glinert (1982) provides a syntactic-semantic study of negative and non-assertive environments in Contemporary Hebrew. He mentions the fact that the Hebrew negators lo ‘no’/‘not’, i- ‘not’, xoser ‘lack of’ and bilti are used in various ways and that bilti negates adjectives – it involves ‘constituent control’, i.e., its scope extends only to the constituent immediately containing it, namely the adjective itself. Therefore, it functions as a prefixal negator per se; see Example (1):

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Corpora

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