The dative in Hebrew poses a problem for a unified characterization as no single criterion seems to guides its interpretation. The present paper approaches this problem from a usage-based perspective, suggesting a multifactorial account of dative functions in Hebrew. Analyzing a corpus of Hebrew dative clauses with multivariate statistical tools I reveal the usage patterns associated with each dative function, showing that traditional descriptions of dative functions are not reflected in usage. Working within a Usage-Based perspective, in which the meaning of a word is its use in language, I argue that Hebrew has only four distinct dative usage patterns, termed Discourse Profile Constructions: conventional correspondences between a multifactorial usage pattern and a unified conceptualization of the world. The four Discourse Profile Constructions are: (i) the Extended Transitive Discourse Profile Construction, (ii) the Human Endpoint Discourse Profile Construction, (iii) the Extended Intransitive Discourse Profile Construction, and (iv), the Evaluative Reference point Discourse Profile Construction. By revealing such correspondences between usage patterns and conceptualizations, the present paper (i) broadens the Construction Grammar notion of Argument Structure Construction, and (ii), suggests an innovative account for the notion of usage as a factor in the conventional pairing between form and function.

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The grammatical subject is a multi-faceted linguistic notion embedded in morphology, syntax and discourse-pragmatics. In Hebrew, grammatical subjects are associated with two distinct word orders, differing along grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic axes. The study examines the growth and proliferation of Hebrew grammatical subjects in the spontaneous speech of preschool children in a Usage-Based perspective, taking into account inflectional, syntactic and semantic properties of the clause side by side with discursive information. The corpus used for this study consisted of the recordings of 54 children in six age groups from two to eight years, engaged in triadic peer talk. Subject, predicate morphology and word order were coded, and utterances were coded according to their conversational roles. Using cluster analysis, each age group was found to have a characteristic usage pattern of subjects with associated syntactic, semantic and discursive properties, underscoring the acquisition and development of grammatical subjects in Hebrew. The usage patterns emerging from the current corpus are taken as a manifestation of the Discourse Profile Constructions notion: probabilistic form-function correlations consisting of multiple sources of formal and functional information, pairing a usage pattern of clauses with a unified construal and discourse function. Three Discourse Profile Constructions emerged from the data: joint action planning, conversational narrative, and conversational presentation. Each of these was associated with a different patterning of lexical or pronominal subjects coupled with predicates with specific temporal features and different word order. These findings suggest that gaining command of the subject category is linked to communicative functions in development.

Hebrew verbs were analyzed in the peer talk produced by 36 Hebrew-speaking children in two age/schooling groups (4;0–5;0 and 5;0–6;0 years), and from two socio-economic backgrounds (SES), mid-high and low. Each of the four age/SES groups consisted of nine children in three triads, where each triad was recorded for 30 minutes while playing. The interface of lexical and morphological growth was demonstrated in the developing organization of verbs in terms of roots, binyan conjugations and derivational families. SES was found the major source of variation in all measures, indicating a smaller and less specific verb lexicon in the low SES groups. Network analyses, a novel methodological approach, revealed the internal structure of the verb category in each age/SES cell, pointing to a scarce and less complex verb lexicon of the low SES groups. These measures also accounted for the growth potential of the network, increasing from the younger low SES group at one pole and peaking in the older mid-high SES at the other pole. These quantitative and qualitative differences in the morphological make-up of the verb lexicon and its usage patterns in preschool peer talk have implications for the impact of SES on verb learning in Hebrew.