Negation in Modern Hebrew

Abstract

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 depiction of negativity: The case of the Brushing Hands gesture used by Hebrew speakers

“…x Modern Hebrew exhibits negative concord in most contexts, since its indefinites typically cooccur with syntactic negators (Shor 2020).…”