Itamar Francez

Modern-Hebrew lama-še Interrogatives and Their Judeo-Spanish Origins

This article describes a Modern Hebrew interrogative construction, not found in earlier varieties of the language, in which a wh -word is followed by a clause headed by the complementizer se ‘that.’ When that clause contains negation, the resulting sentence has the illocutionary force of a suggestion, with the opposite polarity to that of the complementizer clause. In this case, negation fails to license negative concord and negative polarity items. The main properties of the construction are described, an analysis is sketched, and evidence is given indicating Judeo-Spanish as the probable source for the construction.

Quantifiers in Modern Hebrew

After presenting some basic genetic, historical and typological information about Modern Hebrew this chapter outlines the quantification patterns it expresses. It illustrates various semantic types of quantifiers, such as generalized existential, generalized universal, proportional, definite and partitive which are defined in the Quantifier Questionnaire in Chapter 1. It partitions the expression of the semantic types into morpho-syntactic classes: Adverbial type quantifiers and Nominal (or Determiner) type quantifiers. For the various semantic and morpho-syntactic types of quantifiers it also distinguishes syntactically simple and syntactically complex quantifiers, as well as issues of distributivity and scope interaction, classifiers and measure expressions, and existential constructions. The chapter describes structural properties of determiners and quantified noun phrases in Modern Hebrew, both in terms of internal structure (morphological or syntactic) and distribution.

No i-Sums for Nissim (and Shalom)

Lappin and Francez (1994) present a theory of donkey anaphora which, they claim, captures both their existential and their universal readings, while maintaining a uniform representation of donkey pronouns. This paper shows that their analysis does not in fact assign the correct truth conditions to donkey sentences and so does not account correctly for the distribution of readings. An alternative analysis is proposed which retains LFs uniform representation for donkey pronouns, but abandons their analysis in terms of i -sums and the corollary derivation of universal readings by means of a maximality constraint. On the proposed analysis, donkey pronouns are uniformly represented with free variables over (Skolemized) choice functions, as in Chierchias (1992) E-type analysis. The quantification associated with them is inferred quantification over choice functions. Universal readings arise as in Chierchia (1992) when all possible values for the free variable in the representation of a donkey pronoun are salient. For existential readings, a pragmatic account in the spirit of LFs analysis in terms of a cardinality constraint is maintained.