The purpose of this paper is twofold; first, it aims to explore the variety of interpretations of the partially schematic Hebrew construction kexol as in kexol she’ratsiti (‘as much as I wanted’) within the framework of construction grammar; second, it aims to account for this variety through a demonstration of the interrelation between the grammaticalization of the construction and the process of (inter)subjectification or speech-act orientation. The analysis will show that this interrelation has resulted in considerable internal variation in meaning and function in the present day. Corpus findings reveal that initially kexol functioned as a compound consisting of a preposition and a universal quantifier to denote a relation of similarity and comparison. As a result of speaker orientation, the construction has come to exhibit a higher degree of grammaticality in its function as a scalar modifier. Additional schematic and procedural meanings which developed later seem to be the result of hearer-orientation and discourse-orientation tendencies all subsumed under the cover term speech-act orientation

This article investigates the internal structure of the Hebrew particle gam (“also”) from the perspective of construction grammar. Hebrew gam seems to exhibit meanings of both addition and concession, as a single particle and through compounds such as ma gam (“all the more so”), gam kaxa (“as it is”) and gam im (“even”). The findings reveal that the interpretation of the various meanings realized by the construction result from the interaction of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors which in turn lead to a form-meaning pairing associated with conventional meanings. The article argues that gam functions as a partly– schematic construction which displays non-discrete meanings ranging from addition at one end of a continuum through polysemous cases which display both addition and concession to concession at the other end of the continuum.

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The article discusses the development of the Hebrew polysemous construction bɛsɛdɛr (the prefixed preposition bɛ ‘in’ + the noun sɛdɛr ‘order’). An analysis within the framework of Construction Grammar (Traugott & Trousdale, 2013) as well as tendencies of (inter)subjectification (Traugott, 2010, 2012) suggest that the construction developed through fusion and host-class expansion from an objective meaning of concrete and abstract order into an adverb, and later into a fully substantive lexical construction conveying subjective positive evaluation and to an intersubjectified discourse function expressing agreement and approval. The article further supports the proposal that both processes of grammatical and lexical constructionalization are evident in the constructionalization of beseder. Moreover, the analysis suggests that the different meanings which developed are interrelated, as they all derive from the original concept of order and organization, which at some point began to be desirable and appreciated, leading eventually to the development of discourse functions of approval and consent.