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.
In this paper, patterns of clause combining that include the particle ?? (usually translated as ‘that’, ‘which’) in spontaneous Israeli Hebrew will be discussed. I will suggest a classification of the functions of this particle, which is considered as a subordination marker in Hebrew studies. After tracing the origin of the term subordination in grammar and reviewing some of its traditional and recent grammatical conceptions, I will outline some of the problematic issues in applying the notion of subordination to conversational data. The notion of subordinate clause will be re-examined in light of spoken corpus evidence, based on The Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH). I will then show what can be learned from the phenomenon of clause combining about the processes of formation of syntactic structures from pragmatic ones.
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