Dative Marking of the Affectee Role: Data from Modern Hebrew

Abstract

The study concerns the ways in which marking by means of the preposition lehas been in colloquial Hebrew to a wide variety of syntactic contexts in which it did not occur at earlier stages of the language. These constructions include extraneous arguments in datives such as ha tinok 5uv xala lanu 'the baby again got-sick to ( = on) us'; avoidance of surface subjects with experiential predicates such as acuv le rina 'is-sad to Rina'; and extended datives in three-place predicates such as hu hoci la et ha ne5ama 'he took-out to ( = from) her the heart'. These various occurrences of lemarking are shown to provide a unique means of encoding the semantic role of affectee in modern Hebrew, yielding a continuum of participant involvement which ranges from the highest degree of reflexive datives (e.g. dan hitrocec lo ba rexov 'Dan ran to/for himself in-the street') as from biblical usage, through to the most extraneous instance of ethical datives. In typological terms, the widespread use of lein these superficially different functions is shown to correlate with the increasingly dative orientation of modern Hebrew compared both with earlier stages of the language and with a non-dative oriented language like modern English. This study considers how marking by means of the preposition le'to' or 'for' has been in modern Hebrew to a wide range of syntactic contexts in which it did not occur at earlier stages of the language. We aim to show how, in many instances, use of lemarking provides speakers with a means of referring to some individual as affected by a given situation or event, and to thereby quite uniquely encode the case *This is a revised version of a paper that appeared in MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 3, 1981. I am grateful to Mira Ariel, Ora Schwarzwald, and Yael Ziv for their comments on an earlier draft, and to David Gil, Gabriella Hermon, and Edward Keenan for helpful discussion of the issues raised in the paper.

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