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The Hebrew negation adverbial bilti ‘not’ seems to function very differently in Biblical Hebrew than it does in Contemporary Hebrew. This paper addresses this difference and discusses its evolution. The main question addressed in this paper is: How has Hebrew bilti, originally an exceptive marker (with sentential scoping), ended up functioning solely as a privative in contemporary Hebrew? First, this paper argues that the biblical usage of bilti was expanded and turned into a polyfunctional (or ‘polysemous’) item. This happened via a constructionalization process which led to grammatical changes (‘grammaticalization’): The initially implicated negation (via a generalized implicature) turned explicit (semantic). In addition, in Hebrew’s later periods, the usage of bilti was narrowed and it became a privative. Thus, firstly, a pragmatically motivated path of constructionalization of bilti in Biblical Hebrew is suggested. That is, the “pragmatic negation” that arose via a generalized implicature shifted to the semantic level (performing semantic negation, explicit negation). Secondly, bilti’s functions in post-biblical Hebrew periods are outlined, tracing its narrowing functions until its fixation in Contemporary Hebrew as a privative.

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In this paper, I analyze the cyclic linguistic evolution of questions via Bardenstein’s ‘persistence principle’ (Bardenstein, Ruti. 2020b. Persistent argumentative discourse markers. The case of Hebrew rectification-marker be-ʕecem (‘actually’). Journal of Pragmatics 172. 254–269) and argue that questions become “polysemous” via a core function. I show that it is the question’s initial rhetorically-recruited function that motivates its semantic change (alongside grammatical and prosodic changes) and it is that function that also persists throughout its history. I focus my analysis on question-based exclamatives whose peresistent function is the speaker’s strong stance and show that this function persists even when the question-based exclamative cyclically evolves into an adverbial NPI (Negative Polarity Item).

How does a rhetorical question become an adverbial npi down-toner? This paper focusses on a specific type of grammaticalization process: the grammaticalization of a rhetorical construction à la Goldberg (1995), namely, a “constructionalized rhetorical question” (Bardenstein 2018) which turns into a down-toning adverbial. The particular focus of this paper is on the Hebrew lo mi yodea ma (‘not who knows what’; i.e., ‘not of high quality/quantity’) which has developed from the constructionalization of two earlier constructions. Initially, the biblical question-phrase mi yodea (‘who knows’) constructionalized as “negatively biased” (Ladusaw 1996). This is a rhetorical question, to which the obvious answer is negative, and in our case mi yodea can be interpreted as ‘nobody knows’. Most often, it is the case of “not knowing” what the future holds. Then, once a direct object ma (‘what’) was added, it constructionalized once again into a strengthening/ intensification construction mi yodea ma (‘who knows what’), conveying high quantity/quality. This happened since “not knowing what is to happen” can be interpreted as “anything can happen” and this interpretation was used rhetorically to strengthen one‘s utterance. Lastly, mi yodea ma (‘who knows what’) constructionalized under the scope of the negation operator lo (‘not’), into a versatile down-toning adverbial: lo mi yodea ma. Since it is very difficult to negate a strongly positive construction without implying that a less positive one is to some extent true, this negated construction became a versatile down-toner.