No abstract

This paper focuses on a particular use of the item zehu ‘that’s it’ in spoken Israeli Hebrew, in which it functions as a secondary interjection that conveys the meanings of “completion” and “restriction”. In light of zehu’s morphological makeup – a fusion of the sgm demonstrative ze ‘this’ and the 3sgm pronoun hu ‘he’ – the interjectional use is suggested to have originated in the grammaticalization of the clause ze hu ‘That’s him/that,’ a clause that is normally used in Israeli Hebrew for the identification of people and objects. Each of the two interjectional meanings conveyed by zehu is suggested to be conceptually linked to the meanings of “wholeness” and “rejection” – meanings that are potentially related to the basic identificational function of the clause ze hu ‘That’s him/that.’ The interconnection between the meanings of “completion”/ “restriction” and the meanings of “wholeness”/“rejection” is supported by tendencies in semantic change and by patterns of co-speech gestures.

This chapter examines the expression of negation in spontaneous spoken Modern Hebrew. It provides a quantitative description of syntactic negation in the Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH) to address syntactic, pragmatic, and prosodic properties of negation. The study shows that in addition to the prototypical function of rejection and denial, negative utterances are used for mitigating evaluations, implying the desirability of a state/event, and strengthening the speaker’s claim by rejecting potential counter-arguments. Moreover, the prosodic prominence of negators may be influenced by cognitive and interactional motivations. Particular attention is paid to phenomena that usually remain unaddressed in descriptions of negation, such as negative sentences with extra-sentential scope, negation-based discourse markers, and non-linguistic negation.

The lexeme kaχa 'thus', 'in this manner' serves as the primary manner demonstrative in informal Israeli Hebrew. In its basic exophoric function, kaχa may be used by the speaker to refer to some visible physical behavior or state of affairs in the speech situation; much more frequently, however, kaχa is employed by the interlocutor's discourse deictically, targeting existing or anticipated discourse segments, originating either in the speaker's own speech or in the speech of any of the interlocutors. This study analyzes the functional distribution of the discourse-deictic kaχa in spoken Israeli Hebrew, attempting to characterize its possible referents and to identify the pragmatic actions performed by the entire utterance in which kaχa is embedded. The results show that as a discourse-deictic manner demonstrative, kaχa points -retrospectively or prospectively -to an extended discourse segment which spans either a single utterance or several utterances. This discourse segment typically contains a claim, an opinion or an assessment expressed by one of the interlocutors. In so doing, kaχa, together with the entire utterance in which it is embedded, serves different pragmatic purposes. Retrospective kaχa utterances typically have an evaluative function -they are used by the next speaker to respond to the prior speaker's stance with regard to some state of affairs, resulting in convergent or divergent alignment with that speaker. Prospective kaχa utterances, on the other hand, were found to preface the speaker's upcoming extended turns, functioning as a "floor-claiming" device that draws the recipient's attention to the upcoming turn and heightens his interest in its expected content.