Search

Traditionally, syntax has revolved around the identification of strings of words as sentence components, namely as subject, predicate, object, or adjunct. The idea that different sentence types may be described in terms of parts of speech has been discussed extensively in structuralism (Structural Linguistics), as for example in the works of Harris (1946; 1951), Fries (1952), and Hiorth (1962). Structuralism’s focus on Western European languages, and generativism’s early focus on English, emphasized the fact that all sentence forms in these languages ar…

Structural Linguistics is a school of linguistics that developed at the beginning of the 20th century and reigned in the field of linguistics during the first half of the century. Its founding text is Saussure’s (1916) Cours de linguistique générale. Almost totally obsolete by now in its original form, this school has nevertheless survived in a few centers, notably at the Department of Linguistics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Many of its tenets have been undertaken in Cognitive Linguistics (especially in Construction Gramma…

‘Verboid’ (meaning ‘verb-like’) was introduced into linguistic usage by Jespersen (1937: Ch. 39) as a cover term for verb-like entities such as ‘participle’ and ‘agent noun’. The term was adopted by Rosén (1965:83–84; 1966:214–215; 1977:107–113) to designate a group of expressions in Israeli Hebrew whose syntactic behavior is verb-like. These include the existential expression יש yeš ‘there is/are’ used with the preposition le- ‘to’ to express possession (along with אין ʾen ‘there is/are not’ and the relevant past and future forms of היה haya ‘there was/were’), as exemplified …

A ‘nominalization’ is a linguistic expression that encapsulates a proposition in a noun-like form, ready to be inserted in a syntactic slot prototypically reserved for nouns. Modern Hebrew has four nominalization constructions: (1) Action noun (שם פעולה šem peʿula): e.g., שבירה švira ‘breaking’; העשרה haʿašara ‘enriching’ (Rosén 1962:256–259). Coffin and Bolozky (2005:47) use ‘verbal noun’, but also ‘gerund’ (Coffin and Bolozky 2005:287). (2) Gerund (מקור נטוי maqor naṭuy ‘inflected infinitive’ or ‘infinitive construct’): e.g., הגיע- hagiʿ - in בהגיעו be-hagiʿo ‘in/upon hi…

Term for the pre-statehood Jewish community in Palestine used since the end of the 19th century. The modern understanding of the Hebrew word  yishuv differs from its classical meaning in rabbinic literature after acquiring a territorializing semantic component. Linguistically, as a verbal noun, it reflects the polysemy of the verb  yishev while it also occurs widely as a generic term. In combination with the definite article,  yishuv became a quasi-proper name,  ha-yishuv, and a basic concept of the socio-political discourse in Israel.1. Rabbinic and Medieval HebrewThe word  yi…

Seit Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts gebräuchliche Bezeichnung für die vorstaatliche jüdische Gemeinschaft in Palästina. Die moderne Verwendung des hebräischen Worts yishuv unterscheidet sich gegenüber seinen klassischen Bedeutungen in der rabbinischen Literatur durch eine territorialisierende Semantik. Linguistisch betrachtet, spiegelt es als Verbalsubstantiv die Polysemie des Verbs yishev wider; zudem fand es als Gattungsbegriff Verbreitung. Durch das Hinzutreten des bestimmten Artikels ha wurde yishuv schließlich zu einem Quasi-Eigennamen und einem Grundbeg…