The present study examines various uses of the gestures that are usually associated with explicit... more The present study examines various uses of the gestures that are usually associated with explicitly expressed negation (overt negation) in spoken Israeli Hebrew. The analysis of such uses uncovers hidden negative structures (covert negation) at different levels, such as lexical, propositional, or discursive. For example, the study reveals that the gestural patterns that are usually coordinated with grammatical markers of negation may co-occur with various lexemes that have a negative component as part of their meaning (such as absence, bad, and the like), or with discourse markers that imply negation or restriction as part of their procedural meaning. The fact that the same gestural patterns are used in all these contexts suggests that the gestures indicate a higher abstract notion d namely, 'negativity' d rather than negation. Grammatical negation, therefore, should be considered one of the expressions of negativity. Moreover, the findings contribute to the claim that there is a conceptual affiliation between speech and gesture that goes beyond individual linguistic segments.
This paper focuses on a particular use of the item zehu ‘that’s it’ in spoken Israeli Hebrew, in ... more This paper focuses on a particular use of the item zehu ‘that’s it’ in spoken Israeli Hebrew, in which it functions as a secondary interjection that conveys the meanings of “completion” and “restriction”. In light of zehu’s morphological makeup – a fusion of the sgm demonstrative ze ‘this’ and the 3sgm pronoun hu ‘he’ – the interjectional use is suggested to have originated in the grammaticalization of the clause ze hu ‘That’s him/that,’ a clause that is normally used in Israeli Hebrew for the identification of people and objects. Each of the two interjectional meanings conveyed by zehu is suggested to be conceptually linked to the meanings of “wholeness” and “rejection” – meanings that are potentially related to the basic identificational function of the clause ze hu ‘That’s him/that.’ The interconnection between the meanings of “completion”/ “restriction” and the meanings of “wholeness”/“rejection” is supported by tendencies in semantic change and by patterns of co-speech gestures.
The adjective/adverb YAFE ‘pretty, nice’ has been employed from Biblical to Modern Hebrew to char... more The adjective/adverb YAFE ‘pretty, nice’ has been employed from Biblical to Modern Hebrew to characterize a positive external or internal attribute. In Modern Hebrew, YAFE has acquired new pragmatic functions, where it is used as a unipartite utterance conveying praise, concluding a textual unit, or affirming the recipient’s prior talk. This paper examines the pragmatic uses of YAFE as a unipartite utterance in spoken Hebrew through a functional and structural analysis of 45 instances. The analysis reveals that the general function of YAFE involves the evaluation of an event as a positive achievement for some party. This general function is manifested in specific local functions that vary in the nature of the event to which YAFE is directed: (1) recognition of a positive achievement of a person; (2) affirmation of the recipient’s prior talk; and (3) conclusion of a preceding discourse unit for the purpose of transitioning to the next unit. Additionally, our research illustrates that YAFE may be accompanied by verbal and non-verbal elements that support and complement its function.
The present study focuses on eye closure (EC) as a communicative facial gesture in Israeli Hebrew... more The present study focuses on eye closure (EC) as a communicative facial gesture in Israeli Hebrew media talk and pays particular attention to its coordination with coexpressive verbal, prosodic, and embodied resources. Drawing on the interactional approach to language and embodied action, the study demonstrates that EC can convey four contextual meanings-concentration, hedging, negation and totalitydepending on the context in which it occurs and the verbal material with which it is coproduced. The paper proposes that these contextual meanings are derived from the more general meaning of disengagement conveyed by EC. Moreover, the present paper suggests several potential semiotic connections between the basic physiological use of EC as a reflex of self-protection and evasion and its observed contextual meanings. This provides evidence for the co-optation of the basic functions of facial gestures for communicative purposes via metaphorical-metonymical extensions.
In the present study, using Hebrew data, we discuss the formation and semiosis of gestures associ... more In the present study, using Hebrew data, we discuss the formation and semiosis of gestures associated with a cognitive domain of negativity, and delve more deeply into analysis of one such gesture: the Brushing Hands gesture. We propose that this manual gestural form originates in a recurrent everyday experience-cleaning one's hands of food scraps at the end of a meal-and propose that an indication of this particular physical action or experience may develop into an indication of an abstract notion of negativity which can be expanded by the interlocutors in various ways that suit the current context. More generally, we discuss similarities between such gestures and lexical items in various domains, such as metaphoric and metonymic routes and the process of grammaticalization that they may undergo.
The paper focuses on a particular practice of self-repeat through which participants retract thei... more The paper focuses on a particular practice of self-repeat through which participants retract their prior formulations, and explores its multimodal design and use in the dynamic construction of meaning in Hebrew conversation. Drawing on interactional approaches to language and embodied action, we show that the practice of self-repeat is used to retract a formulation judged by its producer as being inadequate and ill-calibrated in the given interactional context. This function is supported by the multimodal configuration in which the lexical repeat is cast, which involves a stable prosodic component and a variable embodied component. Through its prosodic and embodied design, the repeat is contextualized as a noticeable display of accountability for having made an ill-suited choice of words. While the self-repeat alone is sufficient in proposing a problem of calibration, it can also be followed by a lexical replacement, which makes explicit the adjusted or recalibrated term. The self-repeat practice shows how participants engage in semantic work through online and situated revision of their formulations. This exposed process of meaning construction reveals their understanding of the constitutive link between the conceptual and the normative orders as practiced in actual conversation.
The article analyzes debut interviews of female Israeli politicians, in which the interviewees ar... more The article analyzes debut interviews of female Israeli politicians, in which the interviewees are faced with questions or statements that imply that their gender, ethniticity or background prevent them from fulfilling their function as politicians successfully, in accordance with the "Gendered mediation thesis" (GoodYear-Grant 2013). We focus on the interviewees' responses to these questions, and particularly on how grammatically negative utterances are deployed in the service of coping with the presuppositions directed at them. The analysis indicates that the negative utterances do not carry the full weight of rejection of implied presuppositions. Moreover, in some cases negative utterances are used by the speakers as part of a hedging strategy. By describing the role of negation in debut interviews of female Israeli politicians, the paper aims to advance a more comprehensive understanding of linguistic patterns used by women, and other silenced groups, to cope with biased representation.
This paper focuses on an interjectional use of the syntactic negators lo ‘not’ and ejn ‘there is/... more This paper focuses on an interjectional use of the syntactic negators lo ‘not’ and ejn ‘there is/are not’ in informal Israeli Hebrew. In this use, lo and ejn neither negate an explicit component of the immediately prior turn, nor convey disagreement with a prior statement, but rather are used as intensifying interjections that signal the speaker’s high degree of epistemic-affective stance in relation to their upcoming or previous claim. This use is unique in two aspects rarely discussed in existing literature––reflecting a grammaticalization path from a function word to an intensifier and testifying to a conceptual affinity between the domains of intensification and negation.
This paper questions the adequacy of the notion 'verbal agreement' with respect to the inflection... more This paper questions the adequacy of the notion 'verbal agreement' with respect to the inflectional marking of person in verbal paradigms, using Israeli Hebrew (IH) as a case study. With regard to IH, the paper argues against the agreement interpretation of the inflectional affixes of the person-inflected paradigms in general, and against the assumption that third person verbs are not marked for person in particular. Adopting a usage-based and a synchronic intra-paradigmatic perspective, it is suggested that the inflectional affixes in IH should be treated as referential elements ('bound pronouns') that are uniformly marked for person. More broadly, the validity of the concept of verbal agreement is questioned based on its incompatibility with observed cross-linguistic data and its historiographical origin. In this respect, the notion verbal agreement presupposes the primacy/naturalness of a particular clausal formata bipartite structure in which the lexical subject NP and the predicate are present and morphologically independent. As this presupposition essentially reflects a logicophilosophical perspective of the clause originating in the works of the first Greek grammarians rather than a usage-based linguistic one, it is argued that the term 'verbal agreement' is inadequate.
As a consequence of the sociolinguistic circumstances of its emergence, the morpho-syntactic prof... more As a consequence of the sociolinguistic circumstances of its emergence, the morpho-syntactic profile of Modern Hebrew (MH) originates in several sources – classical layers of Hebrew, pre-existing written practices, contact-induced influence of the native languages of the early MH speakers and internal linguistic developments. Adopting a diachronic corpus-based perspective, the present study focuses on one morphosyntactic feature, the distribution of first and second person free subject pronouns with suffix (qatal) and prefix (yiqtol) conjugation verbs. In contrast to the mainly synchronic studies of that feature in MH, the starting point of the present study is data extracted from historical recordings documenting the spontaneous speech of four generations of MH speakers over more than 50 years. Our data indicate two opposite trends: On the one hand, there is a relative stability in the rates of free pronoun usage from the 1960s until the 2010s in two aspects: the near obligatory presence of the free 1SG pronoun ʾani in the prefix-conjugation, and the relatively low rates of free pronouns in the remaining persons. On the other hand, a significant decrease in the use of the 1SG pronoun ʾani in the suffix-conjugation was found throughout the years.
In various languages, demonstratives serve as a ‘fertile ground’ for grammaticalization processes... more In various languages, demonstratives serve as a ‘fertile ground’ for grammaticalization processes that can lead to the creation of various grammatical elements, among which are third-person pronouns, connectors, copulas, and focus particles. A case in point is the item zehu in Israeli Hebrew, which morphologically consists of the masculine singular demonstrative pronoun ze ‘this’ and the enclitic pronoun hu ‘he’. Whereas in formal or literary registers, zehu functions as a (complex) discourse-deictic demonstrative, in less formal registers, most typically in spontaneous conversation, it has different pragmatic-discursive uses, in which it usually constitutes a syntactically and prosodically independent utterance, and it does not have feminine and plural counterparts. In this paper we introduce the various pragmatic-discursive functions that zehu fulfils in spoken Israeli Hebrew, and claim that these define zehu as a discourse marker. As a discourse marker, zehu fulfils three main functions: (1) as a content-related marker, it conveys the meanings of completion and restriction; (2) as a structural marker, it marks the end of a discourse segment; (3) as an interpersonal marker, it indexes various stances. We also suggest a connection between the different uses of zehu in Israeli Hebrew and the original deictic meaning of the demonstrative pronoun ze ‘this’ which occurs in the phrase. We argue that the different uses of zehu as a discourse marker result from a metaphoric extension of its original demonstrative or identificational function. The data for this research were obtained from the Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH) database.
This paper focuses on a particular use of the existential negator ejn ‘there is/are not’ in infor... more This paper focuses on a particular use of the existential negator ejn ‘there is/are not’ in informal Israeli Hebrew, in which it functions as an intensifying secondary interjection that signals the speaker’s high degree of epistemic/affective stance in relation to his upcoming claim. Based on data from several sources of informal Hebrew, as well as on gesture studies, we suggest that the pragmatic meaning of epistemic/affective intensification can be motivated by hypothesizing that ejn ‘there is/are not’ targets implicit elements in discourse, such as potential objections in relation to the speaker’s claim, or a possession of any words to describe the event in question.
This paper reassesses the widespread claim in Hebrew linguistics that the medial third person pro... more This paper reassesses the widespread claim in Hebrew linguistics that the medial third person pronoun in the "subject NP + pronoun + predicate" construction in Israeli Hebrew functions either as copula, or as a referential subject in an extrap-ositional sentence. Based on the examination of this construction in Hebrew conversation , as represented in The Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH), and based on theoretical considerations, the paper argues that the distinction between copular and referential uses of medial third person pronouns is not justified, leading to the conclusion that apparent "copular" third person pronouns are in fact a second realization of the subject referent, and that sentences containing such pronouns are better viewed as cases of subject doubling. This paper positions subject doubling in the context of typology and language acquisition, and argues for the need to analyze it using natural data, focusing on speaker-and listener-oriented motivations.
This chapter examines the expression of negation in spontaneous spoken Modern Hebrew. It provides... more This chapter examines the expression of negation in spontaneous spoken Modern Hebrew. It provides a quantitative description of syntactic negation in the Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH) to address syntactic, pragmatic, and prosodic properties of negation. The study shows that in addition to the prototypical function of rejection and denial, negative utterances are used for mitigating evaluations, implying the desirability of a state/event, and strengthening the speaker's claim by rejecting potential counter-arguments. Moreover, the prosodic prominence of negators may be influenced by cognitive and in-teractional motivations. Particular attention is paid to phenomena that usually remain unaddressed in descriptions of negation, such as negative sentences with extra-sentential scope, negation-based discourse markers, and non-linguistic negation.
As a free-standing utterance, lo ‘no’ is commonly used to negate an explicit component of the imm... more As a free-standing utterance, lo ‘no’ is commonly used to negate an explicit component of the immediately prior turn, conveying disagreement with a prior statement, a negative response to a question, or a refusal to comply with a directive. However, speakers may also use lo ‘no’ in order to address implicit aspects of a speech situation, targeting components of the prior turn that are inferred rather than explicitly conveyed. In these cases lo ‘no’ acts as a discourse marker with several procedural functions. In this paper I examine functional and structural properties of such procedural occurrences of lo ‘no’ in spoken Israeli Hebrew, by analyzing naturally occurring conversations taken from The Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH) database.
From a functional perspective, lo ‘no’ operates primarily in the interpersonal domain of discourse, enabling participants to closely monitor each other’s contributions to the conversation by objecting to implied aspects of the prior turn, by signalling a misunderstanding on the part of the addressee, and by requesting confirmation of their statements. Less frequently, lo ‘no’ functions in the textual domain marking a return to an interrupted topic, in the cognitive domain signalling a change in the course of a complex cognitive action, and in the expressive domain testifying to a heightened emotional involvement in a specific point of a narrative. From a structural perspective, procedural occurrences of lo ‘no’ exhibit a high degree of prosodic independence, occurring in prosodic units of their own, usually ones that end with a terminal prosodic boundary. In some cases, however, lo ‘no’ is realized as a part of a cluster accompanied by another discourse marker. In terms of positioning within turns, lo ‘no’ occurs turn-initially when it targets an immediately prior turn, or turn-finally when it targets the speaker’s own turn. Finally, lo ‘no’ seems to share some of its functions with equivalent negative particles in other languages, highlighting the potential added value of cross-linguistic comparison between equivalent linguistic items.
The present study examines various uses of the gestures that are usually associated with explicit... more The present study examines various uses of the gestures that are usually associated with explicitly expressed negation (overt negation) in spoken Israeli Hebrew. The analysis of such uses uncovers hidden negative structures (covert negation) at different levels, such as lexical, propositional, or discursive. For example, the study reveals that the gestural patterns that are usually coordinated with grammatical markers of negation may co-occur with various lexemes that have a negative component as part of their meaning (such as absence, bad, and the like), or with discourse markers that imply negation or restriction as part of their procedural meaning. The fact that the same gestural patterns are used in all these contexts suggests that the gestures indicate a higher abstract notion — namely, ‘negativity’ — rather than negation. Grammatical negation, therefore, should be considered one of the expressions of negativity. Moreover, the findings contribute to the claim that there is a conceptual affiliation between speech and gesture that goes beyond individual linguistic segments.
This paper focuses on a particular use of the item zehu ‘that’s it’ in spoken Israeli Hebrew, in ... more This paper focuses on a particular use of the item zehu ‘that’s it’ in spoken Israeli Hebrew, in which it functions as a secondary interjection that conveys the meanings of “completion” and “restriction”. In light of zehu’s morphological makeup — a fusion of the SGM demonstrative ze ‘this’ and the 3SGM pronoun hu ‘he’ — the interjectional use is suggested to have originated in the grammaticalization of the clause ze hu ‘That’s him/that,’ a clause that is normally used in Israeli Hebrew for the identification of people and objects. Each of the two interjectional meanings conveyed by zehu is suggested to be conceptually linked to the meanings of “wholeness” and “rejection” — meanings that are potentially related to the basic identificational function of the clause ze hu ‘That’s him/that.’ The interconnection between the meanings of “completion”/ “restriction” and the meanings of “wholeness”/“rejection” is supported by tendencies in semantic change and by patterns of co-speech gestures.
The present study examines various uses of the gestures that are usually associated with explicit... more The present study examines various uses of the gestures that are usually associated with explicitly expressed negation (overt negation) in spoken Israeli Hebrew. The analysis of such uses uncovers hidden negative structures (covert negation) at different levels, such as lexical, propositional, or discursive. For example, the study reveals that the gestural patterns that are usually coordinated with grammatical markers of negation may co-occur with various lexemes that have a negative component as part of their meaning (such as absence, bad, and the like), or with discourse markers that imply negation or restriction as part of their procedural meaning. The fact that the same gestural patterns are used in all these contexts suggests that the gestures indicate a higher abstract notion d namely, 'negativity' d rather than negation. Grammatical negation, therefore, should be considered one of the expressions of negativity. Moreover, the findings contribute to the claim that there is a conceptual affiliation between speech and gesture that goes beyond individual linguistic segments.
This paper focuses on a particular use of the item zehu ‘that’s it’ in spoken Israeli Hebrew, in ... more This paper focuses on a particular use of the item zehu ‘that’s it’ in spoken Israeli Hebrew, in which it functions as a secondary interjection that conveys the meanings of “completion” and “restriction”. In light of zehu’s morphological makeup – a fusion of the sgm demonstrative ze ‘this’ and the 3sgm pronoun hu ‘he’ – the interjectional use is suggested to have originated in the grammaticalization of the clause ze hu ‘That’s him/that,’ a clause that is normally used in Israeli Hebrew for the identification of people and objects. Each of the two interjectional meanings conveyed by zehu is suggested to be conceptually linked to the meanings of “wholeness” and “rejection” – meanings that are potentially related to the basic identificational function of the clause ze hu ‘That’s him/that.’ The interconnection between the meanings of “completion”/ “restriction” and the meanings of “wholeness”/“rejection” is supported by tendencies in semantic change and by patterns of co-speech gestures.
The adjective/adverb YAFE ‘pretty, nice’ has been employed from Biblical to Modern Hebrew to char... more The adjective/adverb YAFE ‘pretty, nice’ has been employed from Biblical to Modern Hebrew to characterize a positive external or internal attribute. In Modern Hebrew, YAFE has acquired new pragmatic functions, where it is used as a unipartite utterance conveying praise, concluding a textual unit, or affirming the recipient’s prior talk. This paper examines the pragmatic uses of YAFE as a unipartite utterance in spoken Hebrew through a functional and structural analysis of 45 instances. The analysis reveals that the general function of YAFE involves the evaluation of an event as a positive achievement for some party. This general function is manifested in specific local functions that vary in the nature of the event to which YAFE is directed: (1) recognition of a positive achievement of a person; (2) affirmation of the recipient’s prior talk; and (3) conclusion of a preceding discourse unit for the purpose of transitioning to the next unit. Additionally, our research illustrates that YAFE may be accompanied by verbal and non-verbal elements that support and complement its function.
The present study focuses on eye closure (EC) as a communicative facial gesture in Israeli Hebrew... more The present study focuses on eye closure (EC) as a communicative facial gesture in Israeli Hebrew media talk and pays particular attention to its coordination with coexpressive verbal, prosodic, and embodied resources. Drawing on the interactional approach to language and embodied action, the study demonstrates that EC can convey four contextual meanings-concentration, hedging, negation and totalitydepending on the context in which it occurs and the verbal material with which it is coproduced. The paper proposes that these contextual meanings are derived from the more general meaning of disengagement conveyed by EC. Moreover, the present paper suggests several potential semiotic connections between the basic physiological use of EC as a reflex of self-protection and evasion and its observed contextual meanings. This provides evidence for the co-optation of the basic functions of facial gestures for communicative purposes via metaphorical-metonymical extensions.
In the present study, using Hebrew data, we discuss the formation and semiosis of gestures associ... more In the present study, using Hebrew data, we discuss the formation and semiosis of gestures associated with a cognitive domain of negativity, and delve more deeply into analysis of one such gesture: the Brushing Hands gesture. We propose that this manual gestural form originates in a recurrent everyday experience-cleaning one's hands of food scraps at the end of a meal-and propose that an indication of this particular physical action or experience may develop into an indication of an abstract notion of negativity which can be expanded by the interlocutors in various ways that suit the current context. More generally, we discuss similarities between such gestures and lexical items in various domains, such as metaphoric and metonymic routes and the process of grammaticalization that they may undergo.
The paper focuses on a particular practice of self-repeat through which participants retract thei... more The paper focuses on a particular practice of self-repeat through which participants retract their prior formulations, and explores its multimodal design and use in the dynamic construction of meaning in Hebrew conversation. Drawing on interactional approaches to language and embodied action, we show that the practice of self-repeat is used to retract a formulation judged by its producer as being inadequate and ill-calibrated in the given interactional context. This function is supported by the multimodal configuration in which the lexical repeat is cast, which involves a stable prosodic component and a variable embodied component. Through its prosodic and embodied design, the repeat is contextualized as a noticeable display of accountability for having made an ill-suited choice of words. While the self-repeat alone is sufficient in proposing a problem of calibration, it can also be followed by a lexical replacement, which makes explicit the adjusted or recalibrated term. The self-repeat practice shows how participants engage in semantic work through online and situated revision of their formulations. This exposed process of meaning construction reveals their understanding of the constitutive link between the conceptual and the normative orders as practiced in actual conversation.
The article analyzes debut interviews of female Israeli politicians, in which the interviewees ar... more The article analyzes debut interviews of female Israeli politicians, in which the interviewees are faced with questions or statements that imply that their gender, ethniticity or background prevent them from fulfilling their function as politicians successfully, in accordance with the "Gendered mediation thesis" (GoodYear-Grant 2013). We focus on the interviewees' responses to these questions, and particularly on how grammatically negative utterances are deployed in the service of coping with the presuppositions directed at them. The analysis indicates that the negative utterances do not carry the full weight of rejection of implied presuppositions. Moreover, in some cases negative utterances are used by the speakers as part of a hedging strategy. By describing the role of negation in debut interviews of female Israeli politicians, the paper aims to advance a more comprehensive understanding of linguistic patterns used by women, and other silenced groups, to cope with biased representation.
This paper focuses on an interjectional use of the syntactic negators lo ‘not’ and ejn ‘there is/... more This paper focuses on an interjectional use of the syntactic negators lo ‘not’ and ejn ‘there is/are not’ in informal Israeli Hebrew. In this use, lo and ejn neither negate an explicit component of the immediately prior turn, nor convey disagreement with a prior statement, but rather are used as intensifying interjections that signal the speaker’s high degree of epistemic-affective stance in relation to their upcoming or previous claim. This use is unique in two aspects rarely discussed in existing literature––reflecting a grammaticalization path from a function word to an intensifier and testifying to a conceptual affinity between the domains of intensification and negation.
This paper questions the adequacy of the notion 'verbal agreement' with respect to the inflection... more This paper questions the adequacy of the notion 'verbal agreement' with respect to the inflectional marking of person in verbal paradigms, using Israeli Hebrew (IH) as a case study. With regard to IH, the paper argues against the agreement interpretation of the inflectional affixes of the person-inflected paradigms in general, and against the assumption that third person verbs are not marked for person in particular. Adopting a usage-based and a synchronic intra-paradigmatic perspective, it is suggested that the inflectional affixes in IH should be treated as referential elements ('bound pronouns') that are uniformly marked for person. More broadly, the validity of the concept of verbal agreement is questioned based on its incompatibility with observed cross-linguistic data and its historiographical origin. In this respect, the notion verbal agreement presupposes the primacy/naturalness of a particular clausal formata bipartite structure in which the lexical subject NP and the predicate are present and morphologically independent. As this presupposition essentially reflects a logicophilosophical perspective of the clause originating in the works of the first Greek grammarians rather than a usage-based linguistic one, it is argued that the term 'verbal agreement' is inadequate.
As a consequence of the sociolinguistic circumstances of its emergence, the morpho-syntactic prof... more As a consequence of the sociolinguistic circumstances of its emergence, the morpho-syntactic profile of Modern Hebrew (MH) originates in several sources – classical layers of Hebrew, pre-existing written practices, contact-induced influence of the native languages of the early MH speakers and internal linguistic developments. Adopting a diachronic corpus-based perspective, the present study focuses on one morphosyntactic feature, the distribution of first and second person free subject pronouns with suffix (qatal) and prefix (yiqtol) conjugation verbs. In contrast to the mainly synchronic studies of that feature in MH, the starting point of the present study is data extracted from historical recordings documenting the spontaneous speech of four generations of MH speakers over more than 50 years. Our data indicate two opposite trends: On the one hand, there is a relative stability in the rates of free pronoun usage from the 1960s until the 2010s in two aspects: the near obligatory presence of the free 1SG pronoun ʾani in the prefix-conjugation, and the relatively low rates of free pronouns in the remaining persons. On the other hand, a significant decrease in the use of the 1SG pronoun ʾani in the suffix-conjugation was found throughout the years.
In various languages, demonstratives serve as a ‘fertile ground’ for grammaticalization processes... more In various languages, demonstratives serve as a ‘fertile ground’ for grammaticalization processes that can lead to the creation of various grammatical elements, among which are third-person pronouns, connectors, copulas, and focus particles. A case in point is the item zehu in Israeli Hebrew, which morphologically consists of the masculine singular demonstrative pronoun ze ‘this’ and the enclitic pronoun hu ‘he’. Whereas in formal or literary registers, zehu functions as a (complex) discourse-deictic demonstrative, in less formal registers, most typically in spontaneous conversation, it has different pragmatic-discursive uses, in which it usually constitutes a syntactically and prosodically independent utterance, and it does not have feminine and plural counterparts. In this paper we introduce the various pragmatic-discursive functions that zehu fulfils in spoken Israeli Hebrew, and claim that these define zehu as a discourse marker. As a discourse marker, zehu fulfils three main functions: (1) as a content-related marker, it conveys the meanings of completion and restriction; (2) as a structural marker, it marks the end of a discourse segment; (3) as an interpersonal marker, it indexes various stances. We also suggest a connection between the different uses of zehu in Israeli Hebrew and the original deictic meaning of the demonstrative pronoun ze ‘this’ which occurs in the phrase. We argue that the different uses of zehu as a discourse marker result from a metaphoric extension of its original demonstrative or identificational function. The data for this research were obtained from the Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH) database.
This paper focuses on a particular use of the existential negator ejn ‘there is/are not’ in infor... more This paper focuses on a particular use of the existential negator ejn ‘there is/are not’ in informal Israeli Hebrew, in which it functions as an intensifying secondary interjection that signals the speaker’s high degree of epistemic/affective stance in relation to his upcoming claim. Based on data from several sources of informal Hebrew, as well as on gesture studies, we suggest that the pragmatic meaning of epistemic/affective intensification can be motivated by hypothesizing that ejn ‘there is/are not’ targets implicit elements in discourse, such as potential objections in relation to the speaker’s claim, or a possession of any words to describe the event in question.
This paper reassesses the widespread claim in Hebrew linguistics that the medial third person pro... more This paper reassesses the widespread claim in Hebrew linguistics that the medial third person pronoun in the "subject NP + pronoun + predicate" construction in Israeli Hebrew functions either as copula, or as a referential subject in an extrap-ositional sentence. Based on the examination of this construction in Hebrew conversation , as represented in The Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH), and based on theoretical considerations, the paper argues that the distinction between copular and referential uses of medial third person pronouns is not justified, leading to the conclusion that apparent "copular" third person pronouns are in fact a second realization of the subject referent, and that sentences containing such pronouns are better viewed as cases of subject doubling. This paper positions subject doubling in the context of typology and language acquisition, and argues for the need to analyze it using natural data, focusing on speaker-and listener-oriented motivations.
This chapter examines the expression of negation in spontaneous spoken Modern Hebrew. It provides... more This chapter examines the expression of negation in spontaneous spoken Modern Hebrew. It provides a quantitative description of syntactic negation in the Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH) to address syntactic, pragmatic, and prosodic properties of negation. The study shows that in addition to the prototypical function of rejection and denial, negative utterances are used for mitigating evaluations, implying the desirability of a state/event, and strengthening the speaker's claim by rejecting potential counter-arguments. Moreover, the prosodic prominence of negators may be influenced by cognitive and in-teractional motivations. Particular attention is paid to phenomena that usually remain unaddressed in descriptions of negation, such as negative sentences with extra-sentential scope, negation-based discourse markers, and non-linguistic negation.
As a free-standing utterance, lo ‘no’ is commonly used to negate an explicit component of the imm... more As a free-standing utterance, lo ‘no’ is commonly used to negate an explicit component of the immediately prior turn, conveying disagreement with a prior statement, a negative response to a question, or a refusal to comply with a directive. However, speakers may also use lo ‘no’ in order to address implicit aspects of a speech situation, targeting components of the prior turn that are inferred rather than explicitly conveyed. In these cases lo ‘no’ acts as a discourse marker with several procedural functions. In this paper I examine functional and structural properties of such procedural occurrences of lo ‘no’ in spoken Israeli Hebrew, by analyzing naturally occurring conversations taken from The Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH) database.
From a functional perspective, lo ‘no’ operates primarily in the interpersonal domain of discourse, enabling participants to closely monitor each other’s contributions to the conversation by objecting to implied aspects of the prior turn, by signalling a misunderstanding on the part of the addressee, and by requesting confirmation of their statements. Less frequently, lo ‘no’ functions in the textual domain marking a return to an interrupted topic, in the cognitive domain signalling a change in the course of a complex cognitive action, and in the expressive domain testifying to a heightened emotional involvement in a specific point of a narrative. From a structural perspective, procedural occurrences of lo ‘no’ exhibit a high degree of prosodic independence, occurring in prosodic units of their own, usually ones that end with a terminal prosodic boundary. In some cases, however, lo ‘no’ is realized as a part of a cluster accompanied by another discourse marker. In terms of positioning within turns, lo ‘no’ occurs turn-initially when it targets an immediately prior turn, or turn-finally when it targets the speaker’s own turn. Finally, lo ‘no’ seems to share some of its functions with equivalent negative particles in other languages, highlighting the potential added value of cross-linguistic comparison between equivalent linguistic items.
The present study examines various uses of the gestures that are usually associated with explicit... more The present study examines various uses of the gestures that are usually associated with explicitly expressed negation (overt negation) in spoken Israeli Hebrew. The analysis of such uses uncovers hidden negative structures (covert negation) at different levels, such as lexical, propositional, or discursive. For example, the study reveals that the gestural patterns that are usually coordinated with grammatical markers of negation may co-occur with various lexemes that have a negative component as part of their meaning (such as absence, bad, and the like), or with discourse markers that imply negation or restriction as part of their procedural meaning. The fact that the same gestural patterns are used in all these contexts suggests that the gestures indicate a higher abstract notion — namely, ‘negativity’ — rather than negation. Grammatical negation, therefore, should be considered one of the expressions of negativity. Moreover, the findings contribute to the claim that there is a conceptual affiliation between speech and gesture that goes beyond individual linguistic segments.
This paper focuses on a particular use of the item zehu ‘that’s it’ in spoken Israeli Hebrew, in ... more This paper focuses on a particular use of the item zehu ‘that’s it’ in spoken Israeli Hebrew, in which it functions as a secondary interjection that conveys the meanings of “completion” and “restriction”. In light of zehu’s morphological makeup — a fusion of the SGM demonstrative ze ‘this’ and the 3SGM pronoun hu ‘he’ — the interjectional use is suggested to have originated in the grammaticalization of the clause ze hu ‘That’s him/that,’ a clause that is normally used in Israeli Hebrew for the identification of people and objects. Each of the two interjectional meanings conveyed by zehu is suggested to be conceptually linked to the meanings of “wholeness” and “rejection” — meanings that are potentially related to the basic identificational function of the clause ze hu ‘That’s him/that.’ The interconnection between the meanings of “completion”/ “restriction” and the meanings of “wholeness”/“rejection” is supported by tendencies in semantic change and by patterns of co-speech gestures.
Vagueness is a natural and integral part of everyday discourse (Jucker et al. 2003). It is often ... more Vagueness is a natural and integral part of everyday discourse (Jucker et al. 2003). It is often discussed in relation to hedging, approximation, generality, ambiguity, ambivalence, and fuzziness. The domain of 'hedging' encompasses various discourse strategies by which a speaker can signal a lack of commitment, either to the full semantic membership of an expression or the force of the speech act being conveyed (Fraser 2010; Kaltenböck et al. 2010; Mihatsch 2010a). Hedging devices can be found at all levels of linguistic analysis: suffixes (-ish), lexical items (roughly), syntactic constructions (negative polar questions: Isn't he here?), and discursive strategies (exemplification: for example). The present study focuses on an intriguing, underdocumented resource for hedging and expressing vagueness: deictic expressions.
50th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea; 10 – 13 September 2017; University of Z... more 50th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea; 10 – 13 September 2017; University of Zurich, Switzerland
Rice 2022). These studies identified various gestural patterns associated with negation in variou... more Rice 2022). These studies identified various gestural patterns associated with negation in various languages, and showed that many of these patterns are shared by several languages in addition to having comparable meanings and pragmatic functions. i These findings suggest not only that these patterns constitute a culturally shared class of gestures, but also that these gestures might have a much wider cross-linguistic and cross-cultural distribution. Certain studies, moreover, have shown that gestures typically coordinated with grammatical negation can also appear in various contexts lacking any explicit verbal Both authors have contributed equally to this work.
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Published by Leon Shor
In this paper we introduce the various pragmatic-discursive functions that zehu fulfils in spoken Israeli Hebrew, and claim that these define zehu as a discourse marker. As a discourse marker, zehu fulfils three main functions: (1) as a content-related marker, it conveys the meanings of completion and restriction; (2) as a structural marker, it marks the end of a discourse segment; (3) as an interpersonal marker, it indexes various stances. We also suggest a connection between the different uses of zehu in Israeli Hebrew and the original deictic meaning of the demonstrative pronoun ze ‘this’ which occurs in the phrase. We argue that the different uses of zehu as a discourse marker result from a metaphoric extension of its original demonstrative or identificational function. The data for this research were obtained from the Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH) database.
From a functional perspective, lo ‘no’ operates primarily in the interpersonal domain of discourse, enabling participants to closely monitor each other’s contributions to the conversation by objecting to implied aspects of the prior turn, by signalling a misunderstanding on the part of the addressee, and by requesting confirmation of their statements. Less frequently, lo ‘no’ functions in the textual domain marking a return to an interrupted topic, in the cognitive domain signalling a change in the course of a complex cognitive action, and in the expressive domain testifying to a heightened emotional involvement in a specific point of a narrative. From a structural perspective, procedural occurrences of lo ‘no’ exhibit a high degree of prosodic independence, occurring in prosodic units of their own, usually ones that end with a terminal prosodic boundary. In some cases, however, lo ‘no’ is realized as a part of a cluster accompanied by another discourse marker. In terms of positioning within turns, lo ‘no’ occurs turn-initially when it targets an immediately prior turn, or turn-finally when it targets the speaker’s own turn. Finally, lo ‘no’ seems to share some of its functions with equivalent negative particles in other languages, highlighting the potential added value of cross-linguistic comparison between equivalent linguistic items.
In this paper we introduce the various pragmatic-discursive functions that zehu fulfils in spoken Israeli Hebrew, and claim that these define zehu as a discourse marker. As a discourse marker, zehu fulfils three main functions: (1) as a content-related marker, it conveys the meanings of completion and restriction; (2) as a structural marker, it marks the end of a discourse segment; (3) as an interpersonal marker, it indexes various stances. We also suggest a connection between the different uses of zehu in Israeli Hebrew and the original deictic meaning of the demonstrative pronoun ze ‘this’ which occurs in the phrase. We argue that the different uses of zehu as a discourse marker result from a metaphoric extension of its original demonstrative or identificational function. The data for this research were obtained from the Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH) database.
From a functional perspective, lo ‘no’ operates primarily in the interpersonal domain of discourse, enabling participants to closely monitor each other’s contributions to the conversation by objecting to implied aspects of the prior turn, by signalling a misunderstanding on the part of the addressee, and by requesting confirmation of their statements. Less frequently, lo ‘no’ functions in the textual domain marking a return to an interrupted topic, in the cognitive domain signalling a change in the course of a complex cognitive action, and in the expressive domain testifying to a heightened emotional involvement in a specific point of a narrative. From a structural perspective, procedural occurrences of lo ‘no’ exhibit a high degree of prosodic independence, occurring in prosodic units of their own, usually ones that end with a terminal prosodic boundary. In some cases, however, lo ‘no’ is realized as a part of a cluster accompanied by another discourse marker. In terms of positioning within turns, lo ‘no’ occurs turn-initially when it targets an immediately prior turn, or turn-finally when it targets the speaker’s own turn. Finally, lo ‘no’ seems to share some of its functions with equivalent negative particles in other languages, highlighting the potential added value of cross-linguistic comparison between equivalent linguistic items.
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