Reflexive verbs in Hebrew: Deep unaccusativity meets lexical semantics

Abstract

Reflexive verbs in Modern Hebrew show specific morphological marking: only one of the seven verbal templates in the language can be used for reflexives. Yet this morphological marking also appears on anticausative verbs, which have different syntactic and semantic properties. I provide an analysis of reflexivity in Hebrew which does not make reference to dedicated reflexive morphosyntax. By combining independently needed functional heads, the proposal explains what in the syntax underlies this morphology and how different kinds of verbs end up with identical morphophonological properties. To this end, I consider the lexical semantics of individual lexical roots as well as the syntactic configurations in which roots and arguments are embedded. The resulting theory is one in which lexical roots trigger specific interpretations of the syntax at the interfaces.

Keywords

Hebrew, lexical semantics, morphology, syntax, reflexivity, unaccusativity

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Kastner, I., (2017) “Reflexive verbs in Hebrew: Deep unaccusativity meets lexical semantics”, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 2(1): 75. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.299

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Itamar Kastner (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin)

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