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Reflexive verbs in Hebrew: Deep unaccusativity meets lexical semantics

“…A few words on the system as a whole are in order before focusing on the analysis of an individual template. It has been suggested that analysis of the templates can rely on different values of the Voice head (Doron 2003;Arad 2005;Kastner 2016), originally proposed as the functional head introducing external arguments (Kratzer 1996). The typology of Voice heads follows recent proposals by Schäfer (2008) for German, Bruening (2014) for English, Alexiadou & Doron (2012) and Spathas et al (2015) for Greek, Alexiadou & Doron (2012) for Hebrew, Wood (2015) for Icelandic, and Kastner & Zu (2015) for Latin.…”

“…Not all will be discussed here: our focus is mainly on the one notated hitXaY̯ eZ, with other templates brought up as necessary. Each template is traditionally associated with a certain kind of argument structure alternation: causative, passive, and so on ( Berman 1978;Doron 2003;Arad 2005;Borer 2013;Kastner 2016). For example, one typical alternation is between transitive verbs in XaYaZ and their anticausative (detransitivized) variants in niXYaZ.…”

“…Each template is traditionally associated with a certain kind of argument structure alternation: causative, passive, and so on (Berman 1978;Doron 2003;Arad 2005;Borer 2013;Kastner 2016). 'The gate opened.'…”

“…For this part of the puzzle I will modify the suggestion made by Doron (2003) according to which Hebrew has an agentive modifier with predictable spell-out and consistent semantics. The current section formalizes this element as…”

“…This element is phonologically overt. I follow Doron (2003) and Kastner (2017) in assuming that XaYaZ is derived morphophonologically through the combination of Voice, v and the root, whereas XiY̯ eZ is the result of adding…”