Reassessing the third person pronominal “copula” in spoken Israeli Hebrew
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Leon Shor
Abstract
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 extrapositional 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.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Shlomo Izre’el (Tel Aviv University), Wilbert Spooren (Radboud University), Wyke Stommel (Radboud University), Mark Dingemanse (Radboud University), Pavel Ozerov (University of Münster), and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable and informative comments on previous versions of this article.
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© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Postnominal relative clauses in Chinese
- Outlining a grammaticalization path for the Spanish formula en plan (de): A contribution to crosslinguistic pragmatics
- From connective construction to final particle: The emergence of the Korean disapproval marker hakonun
- Complex predicates, simple inflecting verbs, and “uninflecting verbs” in Pre-Basque
- What makes up a reportable event in a language? Motion events as an important test domain in linguistic typology
- Words are constructions, too: A construction-based approach to English ablaut reduplication
- Oblique nominals, a verbal affix and late merge
- Experimental evidence supporting the overlapping distribution of core and exempt anaphors: Re-examination of long-distance bound caki-casin in Korean
- Reassessing the third person pronominal “copula” in spoken Israeli Hebrew
- Domain restriction in child Mandarin: Implications for quantifier spreading
- Nouns and verbs in the speech signal: Are there phonetic correlates of grammatical category?
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Postnominal relative clauses in Chinese
- Outlining a grammaticalization path for the Spanish formula en plan (de): A contribution to crosslinguistic pragmatics
- From connective construction to final particle: The emergence of the Korean disapproval marker hakonun
- Complex predicates, simple inflecting verbs, and “uninflecting verbs” in Pre-Basque
- What makes up a reportable event in a language? Motion events as an important test domain in linguistic typology
- Words are constructions, too: A construction-based approach to English ablaut reduplication
- Oblique nominals, a verbal affix and late merge
- Experimental evidence supporting the overlapping distribution of core and exempt anaphors: Re-examination of long-distance bound caki-casin in Korean
- Reassessing the third person pronominal “copula” in spoken Israeli Hebrew
- Domain restriction in child Mandarin: Implications for quantifier spreading
- Nouns and verbs in the speech signal: Are there phonetic correlates of grammatical category?
