Definiteness in the Hebrew noun phrase

Abstract

This paper suggests an analysis of Modern Hebrew noun phrases in the framework of HPSG. It focuses on the peculiar properties of the definite article, including the requirement for definiteness agreement among various elements in the noun phrase, definiteness inheritance in construct-state nominals, the fact that the article does not combine with constructs and the similarities between construct-state nouns and adjectives. Central to our analysis is the assumption that the Hebrew definite article is an affix, rather than a clitic or a stand-alone word. Several arguments, from all levels of linguistic representation, are provided to justify this claim. Adopting the lexical hypothesis, we conclude that the article combines with nominals in the lexicon, and is no longer available for syntactic processes. This leads to an analysis of noun phrases as NPs, rather than as DPs; we show that such a view is compatible with accepted criteria for headedness. We provide an HPSG analysis that covers the above mentioned phenomena, correctly predicting the location of the definite article in constructs, accounting for definiteness agreement and definiteness inheritance constraints, and yielding similar structures for the two major ways of expressing genitive relations in Hebrew.

Definiteness spreading in the Hebrew construct state

“…As noted by Borer (1999), Danon (2001), Hazout (2000), Siloni (2000Siloni ( , 2002, Wintner (2000) and others, one can find, in addition to constructs headed by a noun, constructs headed by adjectives, quantifiers, numerals, and participles. According to Botwinik-Rotem and Terzi (2008), Danon (2008) and Siloni (2000), even PPs in Hebrew should be analyzed as instances of the CS.…”

“…4 The definite article, ha-, is a prefix that attaches to the noun, rather than an independent word. Following Borer (1988Borer ( , 1999, Danon (2001), Falk (2006), Siloni (1997), Wintner (2000) and others, I consider the article to be the morphological realization of a morphosyntactic definiteness feature, [+def], rather than an independent syntactic head. Among other advantages of this view, it makes it possible to analyze definiteness agreement between nouns and modifying adjectives, illustrated below in (4), as a simple instance of concord, which would be derived using the same mechanism that accounts for gender and number concord between nouns and adjectives.…”

“…Incorporation and word formation (Benmamoun, 2003;Borer, 1999) 3. Reentrancy and constraint-based approaches (Falk, 2006;Wintner, 2000) 4. Semantic composition (Dobrovie-Sorin, 2000Heller, 2002) Below I discuss each of these approaches and argue that none of them provides a satisfactory explanation of both syntactic and semantic aspects of DS.…”

“…Consider the definiteness of the adjectival CS in the following example: The adjectival CS arukat ha-raglayim is a modifier of the definite-marked noun ha-yalda; like simple adjectives, it agrees with the noun in number, gender and definiteness (Borer, 1999;Hazout, 2000;Wintner, 2000). Unlike simple adjectives, however, the agreement here seems to be 'distributed': while the adjectival head of the CS, arukat, overtly agrees with the modified noun in gender and number, definiteness agreement is overtly marked on the nominal phrase embedded within the CS, ha-raglayim.…”

“…This distinction between free and bound nouns follows not only the morphological facts, but also the observation that the embedded DP could be one that is inherently specified for definiteness, such as a proper name, while the lexical head of a CS is morphologically unspecified for definiteness, and any definiteness value that it eventually comes to carry is ''inherited''. Following the suggestion in Wintner (2000), this could be assumed to be a property of the lexical process that derives heads of CS from heads in their free form: the output of this lexical process is a head that must enter the derivation with an unvalued definiteness feature. Furthermore, following Danon (2006), I will assume that D in Hebrew enters the derivation with an unvalued [def] feature; given that definiteness is a semantic property of full DPs, I assume that definiteness can only be interpreted at the DP level (and not at the NP level), following an Agree relation between D and another node that will value the D's [def] feature.…”