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Raising, inversion and agreement in modern Hebrew1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2015

NURIT MELNIK
NURIT MELNIK*
Affiliation:
The Open University of Israel
*
Author’s address: The Open University of Israel, Department of Literature, Language and the Arts, Raanana, 4353701, Israelnuritme@openu.ac.il
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Abstract

This paper focuses on the interaction between raising, subject–verb inversion and agreement in Modern Hebrew. It identifies, alongside ‘standard’ (i.e., English-like) subject-to-subject raising, two additional patterns where the embedded subject appears post-verbally. In one, the raising predicate exhibits long-distance agreement with the embedded subject, while in the other, a colloquial variant, it is marked with impersonal (3sm) agreement. The choice between the three raising constructions in the language is shown to be solely dependent on properties of the embedded clause. The data are discussed and analyzed against a background of typological and theoretical work on raising. The analysis, cast in the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), builds on research on raising, selectional locality, agreement, subjecthood and information structure, as well as verb-initial constructions in Modern Hebrew.

Keywords

agreementHPSGinversionmodalsModern Hebrewraisingsubjecthood
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , 01 February 2017 , pp. 147 - 179
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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