The meaning of zehu in spoken Israeli Hebrew:

Abstract

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.

The depiction of negativity: The case of the Brushing Hands gesture used by Hebrew speakers

“…The abstract notion of totality is closely connected with the idea of termination (see below) or completion (cf. Inbar and Shor 2019;Shor and Inbar 2019;. Being total means being complete, whole.…”

“…The gesture was found to co-occur with expressions such as nigmar "is over," ha-injan sagur "the matter is closed" and zehu (lit.) "this it" which has a summative force (Shor and Inbar 2019; cf. shi ke nan "that's it/that" in Hausa, Jaggar 2001: 510; Will…”