Talks by Anna Inbar
סְלֵש/סלאש – קַשָּר חדש בעברית בת¬־זמננו, 2023
We explore multimodal assemblies involved in employment of Hebrew causal clauses prefaced by the ... more We explore multimodal assemblies involved in employment of Hebrew causal clauses prefaced by the conjunction ki 'because.' We focus on ki-clauses that emerge in sequential environments involving responsive disaffiliative moves, and show that, in such environments, ki-clauses tend to convey information that appeals to the participants' shared knowledge and to be accompanied by the PUOH. We argue that the PUOH in such contexts constitutes an epistemic stance marker functioning to present the account prefaced by ki as based on shared knowledge, in pursuit of intersubjectivity and a shared perspective. The reference to shared epistemic access implies an interpretation of the disaffiliative move as reasonable under the circumstances provided by the account, inviting co-participants to display affiliation. The study thus reveals a connection between causality and epistemics and suggests an interactional source for their interrelatedness.
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.
The present study focuses on the conceptualization of conjunctive relations in spoken Israeli Heb... more The present study focuses on the conceptualization of conjunctive relations in spoken Israeli Hebrew, examining it across two modalities-the verbal and the gestural (co-speech gestures). Issues of interest here include the following questions: 1. How are abstract relations represented by visual means? 2. Does the gesture show a relation similar to that captured as grammatical in spoken language or perhaps it represents another system of relations? 3. What can be learned from the way the gestures convey meaning, and how do they reveal aspects of the mechanism of language and underlying cognitive processes? This study is based on ca. 20 hours of conversations by 50 speakers. The corpus consists of TV interviews in Hebrew involving hand actions, which were recorded between 2009 and 2017. The TV interviews were selected from the TV programs Cross Israel, Life According to Odetta, and Soul Talk. The first one deals with Israeli society and its problems and processes that shape it in a variety of areas of life: science, culture, economics, and politics. The second one deals with the fields of home, family, health, and nurturing. The third one is a personal conversation with Israeli celebrities who reveal their personal details and experiences. The age of speakers in all programs is over 20. The programs document speakers filmed from their waist up. The study focuses upon manual gestures as the main tool for analysis (Kendon 2004). 1. First, the utterances in which the conjunctive relations were expressed in speech were identified. 2. When there was any gesture that could be coordinated with one of these relations, the frame in which it appears was saved and cataloged under one of the categories that was defined in advance (addition, alternation, contrast, causality, purpose, and condition). 3. Later the patterns that are common to gestures in each category were analyzed. 4. It turned out that the categorization that was defined in advance did not fit well with the findings. 5. Therefore, the material was redistributed according to the nature of the gesture and not according to the relation it was supposed to indicate.
Traditionally, the most essential criteria for negativity are the presence of a negative particle... more Traditionally, the most essential criteria for negativity are the presence of a negative particle and the occurrence in a specific syntactic environment (Ayer 1963). However, according to Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (1996), the identity of negation does not depend solely on the overtly expressed negative words, and the negative identity of some linguistic units may be covert. We will show that the negativity of such linguistic units may be uncovered by gestures. The present study will examine different uses of the gestures that are usually associated with explicitly expressed negation in spoken Israeli Hebrew to reveal categories of covert negation. To this end, we compiled a 20-hour corpus of TV interviews in Hebrew among over 50 speakers. First, we identified several recurrent gestural patterns that co-occurred with grammatical negation expressed by morphosyntactic elements or lexemes with inherent negative meaning. In the second stage, we searched for utterances that were accompanied by the same gestures that did not contain markers of grammatical negation and attempted to determine the motivation of the co-occurrence of these gestures with those utterances. The analysis uncovers hidden negative structures of different types at the level of discourse, sentence, and single lexical items. For example, these gestures may indicate implicit negation that is not part of the propositional content of the utterance. In one of the examples, the interviewee was asked whether her mother, who had been struggling with cancer, still wanted to live or if she preferred to die. The speaker answered: " She wanted to live until the last moment, " using a gesture that was usually associated with grammatical negation. We propose that the negation expressed here was in fact implied by the words uttered, namely, " She did not want to die. " In other contexts, these gestural patterns may co-occur with an expression of intensification, such as absolutely, totally, or completely. These uses contribute to understanding intensification as a rejection of implied alternatives in context. Moreover, these patterns may co-occur with discourse markers that imply negation or restriction as part of their procedural meaning. The fact that the same gestural patterns are used to indicate explicit (grammatical) negation and implicit (covert) negation suggests that these gestures indicate a higher abstract notion, namely, negativity rather than negation. Grammatical negation, therefore, should be considered one of the expressions of negativity. This analysis is in line with the cognitive approach to negation initiated by Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (ibid.), and it explores deeper levels than syntax and morphology to " cover the negation incorporated in words, discourse or knowledge frames. " Furthermore, these findings contribute to the claim that there is a conceptual affiliation between speech and gesture that goes beyond individual linguistic segments (de
This paper aims to present the syntactic and prosodic properties of list constructions in spoken ... more This paper aims to present the syntactic and prosodic properties of list constructions in spoken Israeli Hebrew, to present recurrent gestural patterns associated with these constructions, and to show the interplay of these properties with different functions of lists in discourse. List construction will be defined as an abstract pattern consisting of a set of any linguistic elements (listees) that are functionally parallel, while the structure as a whole has a single communicative intention (Inbar, forthcoming). The most obvious kind of list is coordination, but repetitions and reformulations may also be qualified as lists (e.g. Blanche-Benveniste 1987). As such, this abstract linguistic pattern binds linguistic phenomena detectable at different levels of structure that are typically studied separately. The data for this study were primarily obtained from a 20-hour corpus of television interviews in Hebrew, including over 50 speakers. Praat software was used to analyze the acoustic properties of list constructions. The constructions were recognized based on functional parallelism of the listees. Taking the 'usage-based' perspective, we indicated the functions of lists as a whole, while examining the functional distribution of their prosodic patterns and of the revealed gestural patterns associated with them. As noted by Selting (2007: 488), prosody is one of the constitutive means used by speakers to systematically construct lists and by recipients to identify them. For example, one of the functions of open lists is to lead to building a higher-level category (Mauri 2017), and all of the elements in this type usually have similar intonation contours. In exhaustive lists, however, the last element is marked differently from its predecessors. The analysis of gestures coordinated with list constructions in spoken Israeli Hebrew reveals another strategy that makes list constructions visible, and allows the interlocutor to identify their discursive functions explicitly. Lists show a high degree of functional variation, and it was found that particular gestural patterns were systematically associated with particular functions of lists. For example, gestures can reveal different purposes of list constructing, such as building a higher-level category while focusing on the members of this category or on the category itself. Other gestural patterns may be used for reformulations. However, it was found that one particular gestural pattern—symmetrical delineating different areas in gesture space— can be used with all types of lists, thus highlighting their common syntactic structure. Interestingly, all revealed gestural patterns mirror, in some way, the functional parallelism of the listees, which is the main characteristic of the pattern in question. To summarize, the features of list constructions may be indicated via different modalities. Different gestural forms may distinguish between pragmatic aspects of list constructions that are not expressed in Hebrew grammatically; thus, the study of gestures associated with list constructions can contribute to a systematic analysis of lists at different levels.
The Hebrew particle vɛ (usually translated as " and ") is commonly regarded as a prototypical coo... more The Hebrew particle vɛ (usually translated as " and ") is commonly regarded as a prototypical coordination marker. Coordination is one of the most studied fields in linguistics, but despite decades of intensive examination, theoretical accounts differ significantly, and there is no consensus on the best analysis. In this paper I will show that revealing the range of relations between states of affairs that cannot be communicated by conjoining two sentences with vɛ could shed light on the meaning of this word and contribute to current debates on the notion of coordination in grammar. Herb Clark was (as noted by Gazdar 1979: 44) probably the first person to point out that there are relations that can be communicated by the use of juxtaposed sentences but which do not seem to be communicated when these same sentences are conjoined by " and ". Since then, a number of semantic, pragmatic, and cognitive explanations were proposed as to why " and " appears not to allow certain sorts of connections between its conjuncts (e.g., Ariel 2012; Bar-Lev & Palacas 1980; Carston 2002). In the present paper I will suggest a different account, which is based on Sperber & Wilson " s (1995) term of interpretive resemblance. This work is based on the analysis of juxtaposed clauses that were selected from The Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH). The examples were firstly divided into two categories: (1) the examples in which the insertion of vɛ as a linking element is optional; (2) the examples in which the insertion of vɛ is impossible or could cause the meaning change. This division was based on judgment tests. Afterward, the classification of the examples from the second category was suggested, based on their discourse functions and semantics. This corpus-based study reveals a range of relations between two juxtaposed sentences that are precluded when they are conjoined with vɛ in Modern Hebrew, e.g., reformulation, correction, summary, exemplification, and specification. Analyzing such juxtaposed sentences in terms of interpretive resemblance between propositional, or conceptual, representations leads to the conclusion that the relationship between them must be hold at the level of communicated thought. In other words, there is a sense in which they can be interpreted as sharing the same set of contextual implications, or both of them refer to the same thought. In the following example, the second utterance should be understood as a correction of the first one: vɛ axʃav jɛʃ lanu zɛhut isʁaɛlit || and now there_is to_us identity Israeli || nixpɛta alɛjnu zɛhut isʁaɛlit ||
The present study focuses on the conceptualization of conjunctive relations in Spoken Israeli Heb... more The present study focuses on the conceptualization of conjunctive relations in Spoken Israeli Hebrew, examining it across two modalities—the verbal and the gestural (co-speech gestures). To do so, I first examined whether the appearance of any grammatical realization of a particular conjunctive relation—such as additive ('and'), alternative ('or'), and contrastive ('but'),—in speech was coordinated with a specific gesture or not. This examination revealed that co-speech gestures were indeed associated with these abstract (ideational or semantic) relations between referents or propositions, but the relations represented in gestures did not fully match those overtly expressed in spoken language. Rather, they seemed to represent a more fundamental system of relations. The study of paused fragments of TV interviews in Hebrew involving hand movement reveals, for example, that parallel movement of one or both hands from side to side is associated with addition, alternation, contrast, and opposition ('as opposed to'), each of which is captured as a distinct relation in grammar. This suggests the existence of a fundamental relation at the cognitive infrastructure unifying the relations mentioned above, which is revealed by gestures. The dominant form of gesture that accompanies the relations mentioned above is delineating different areas in gesture space by moving one hand, or both hands simultaneously from side to side. Analyzing the visual track of this gesture and revealing the core meaning that these relations share lead to the conclusion that this gesture signifies distinction. Empirical findings on the development of language and conceptualization suggest that differentiation between physical objects is carried out by creating a gap between them. Early in life, infants distinguish between objects in space when there is a gap between them. This early mechanism of differentiation is utilized by gestures in representing the distinction between abstract referents as well. Analyzing the visual track of the gestures coordinated with conjunctives and comparing it to the metaphoricity in specific Hebrew conjunctive expressions illuminates how at different levels of awareness abstract ideas are relocated into concrete and perceptible domains. Furthermore, the analysis of gestures associated with additive relation reveals not only that this relation is unified with other (alternative and contrastive) relations by the same gestural pattern, but also that different gestural forms may distinguish between other aspects of coordination which are not expressed in Hebrew grammatically, such as referring to the processes of making a list or building ad hoc categories. Thus, the focus on gestures associated with abstract relations allows us to refine some of the questions that concern the study of gestures in general: a. How does a gesture show a concrete visual image of abstract messages, and in which ways does it explain them? b. What can be learned from the way the gestures convey the meaning, and how do they reveal aspects of the mechanism of language and underlying cognitive processes?
Papers (Hebrew) by Anna Inbar
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.
The present study aims to examine the uses of the Hebrew general extenders ve ze (lit.) ‘and this... more The present study aims to examine the uses of the Hebrew general extenders ve ze (lit.) ‘and this’ and o mashehu ‘or something’ in spoken Israeli Hebrew. Based on data from the Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH), I will discuss their roles in Hebrew discourse, their grammatical status, as well as the cognitive, social and cultural aspects of their use. I will show that these expressions have various roles in Hebrew conversations, both on the propositional and interpersonal levels. By the use of ve ze and o mashehu speaker instructs the interlocutor to interpret the previous element as an example of a more general (ad hoc) category that the speaker evokes in discourse for a particular communication purpose. The expression ve ze signals that the speaker did not present all the information, while the expression o mashehu signals that the information provided may not have a truth value. On an interpersonal level, ve ze and o mashehu may express solidarity, mitigate the message, and they are used as a politeness strategy. Moreover, I would argue that the use of these expressions demonstrates the way in which the culture of speakers is reflected in language.
עיונים בשפה וחברה
החיוך והצחוק הם תגובות פיזיולוגיות בלתי־רצוניות שגויסו כמשאב העומד לרשות המשתתפים באינטראקציה. ני... more החיוך והצחוק הם תגובות פיזיולוגיות בלתי־רצוניות שגויסו כמשאב העומד לרשות המשתתפים באינטראקציה. ניהול מערכת היחסים בין המשתתפים באינטראקציה הוא הסיבה העיקרית להופעתם, ולהם תפקידים מגוונים התלויים, בין השאר, בתרבות ובסוג השיח (למשל, Provine, 2000; Ekman & O'Sullivan, 2000). במאמר זה אדון בתפקידים אחדים של החיוך והצחוק בשיח העברי הדבור. אנתח דוגמאות שבהן הדובר צוחק או מחייך בסוף המבע שהוא הפיק או במהלכו, ולא כתגובה לדברי בן שיחו. אראה שהחיוך והצחוק עשויים להופיע בהקשרים כגון אמירת דברים שאינם מתיישבים עם הערכים החברתיים, הצעת תיקון, מתיחת ביקורת ותיאור מצבים בלתי־נעימים. בהקשרים אלה קיים איום על תדמיתם של משתתפי האינטראקציה, והחיוך והצחוק משמשים אמצעי ריכוך ושלילה, ועל כן אציע שאפשר לראות בהם אסטרטגיה להבעת נימוס. זיהוי התפקיד הזה בשיח מאפשר לחשוף את הערכים ואת צורות ההתנהגות המקובלות בחברה הישראלית, שכן במקרים רבים תדמיתם של הדוברים מאוימת כאשר אפשר לשייך לה ערך שיש בו סטייה מן הנורמה.
Hebrew Linguistics , 2019
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Talks by Anna Inbar
Papers (Hebrew) by Anna Inbar
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.