Danon, Gabi. 2015. מה זה זה? ניתוח תחבירי של האוגד “זה” בעברית המודרנית ‎. Hebrew Linguistics 69, 23-43. (In Hebrew)

Abstract

Verbless clauses in Hebrew involving the pronominal copula ze never display subject-copula or subject-predicate agreement, with the copula and adjectival predicates invariably being in the default masculine singular form. Additionally, these sentences are often characterized by an interpretation that differs from the typical predicational interpretation found with the copula hu. After surveying the basic syntactic and semantic properties of ze-clauses, this paper argues against several possible analyses which would explain these properties by claiming that the clause-initial noun phrase is not the subject. Instead, it is argued that the clause-initial noun phrase is a featureless DP in subject position, where lack of features blocks not only agreement but also the possibility of binding and control relations; features of the noun, in this case, are present at the NP level but are not present at the DP level. This leads to the question of what constrains the distribution of such featureless DPs. Following standard assumptions in current minimalist syntax, lack of agreement is argued to correspond to lack of Case; and following the central insight of the Visibility Condition of Chomsky (1986), it is argued that the possibility of having a Caseless DP is limited to non-thematic DPs. Hence, lack of agreement in ze-clauses is argued to follow from general syntactic principles rather than from any construction-specific property, under the assumption (independently argued for in previous work) that ze-clauses are not predicational. This is further supported by showing that similar syntactic and semantic properties can be found in a variety of Hebrew raising constructions that do not involve the copula ze, as well as in similar constructions found in other, unrelated, languages.

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