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Definiteness and Indefiniteness in Hebrew - Review| old_uid | 4603 |
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| title | Definiteness and Indefiniteness in Hebrew - Review |
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| start_date | 2008/04/14 |
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| schedule | 14h-16h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | Definiteness in Hebrew poses interesting problems, descriptively and theoretically. Indefiniteness is unmarked in Hebrew while definiteness is signalled by the marker ha-.
Hebrew nominals display definiteness agreement, accordingly, elements in a
definite nominal phrase (nouns, adjectives, demonstratives) are individually marked by ha-. Central to the discussion of definiteness in Hebrew is the Construct State, one of two forms of genitive phrases, which is apparently unique to Semitic languages.
These phenomena raise fundamental questions for the analysis of definiteness in Hebrew and cross-linguistically. One important issue is the status of Hebrew indefiniteness: is definiteness a (+/-) feature with a phonologically null indefinite marker or is indefiniteness an absence of specification for definiteness?
Another issue is the category of the definite marker itself: is it a as a clitic or an affix; can it be categorised as a determiner on part with the definite article of other languages?
Finally, the study of Hebrew definiteness reveals that the presence or absence of ha- is not necessarily indicative of uniqueness, specificity or accessibility evoked by the nominal phrases. This mismatch between morpho-syntactic definiteness and semantico-pragmatic definiteness poses its own interesting set of problems.
This talk outlines some of the basic problems raised by Hebrew definiteness and illustrates some of the main approaches to this topic presented in the linguistic literature. |
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| responsibles | Cabredo Hofherr |
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