TY - JOUR
T1 - Differential Object Marking in Modern Hebrew
T2 - Definiteness and partitivity
AU - Hacohen, Aviya
AU - Kagan, Olga
AU - Plaut, Dana
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s).
PY - 2021/1/1
Y1 - 2021/1/1
N2 - This paper investigates the phenomenon of differential object marking (DOM) currently exhibited in Modern Hebrew. The consensus in the theoretical literature on Hebrew has been that the object marker et is only licensed in the context of definite DPs. We observe, however, that in Modern Hebrew partitive nominals may also be preceded by et. Using a judgment task, we asked 41 native Hebrew-speaking adults to rate sentences with et-marked partitive object DPs on a 5-point acceptability scale. Our results reveal that partitive items received a considerably high acceptance score, with an overall average of 3.6/5. In addition, we found a main effect for object-position and quantifier-type. In particular, acceptability of et-marked partitives increased significantly for preposed DPs and for DPs that contained proportional quantifiers (as opposed to cardinals). The optional acceptability of et-marked partitives ostensibly challenges the generally accepted view, according to which the distribution of et is categorically determined based on the two-way +/-definiteness opposition. We put forth a formal syntactic analysis that reconciles our findings with the definiteness approach.
AB - This paper investigates the phenomenon of differential object marking (DOM) currently exhibited in Modern Hebrew. The consensus in the theoretical literature on Hebrew has been that the object marker et is only licensed in the context of definite DPs. We observe, however, that in Modern Hebrew partitive nominals may also be preceded by et. Using a judgment task, we asked 41 native Hebrew-speaking adults to rate sentences with et-marked partitive object DPs on a 5-point acceptability scale. Our results reveal that partitive items received a considerably high acceptance score, with an overall average of 3.6/5. In addition, we found a main effect for object-position and quantifier-type. In particular, acceptability of et-marked partitives increased significantly for preposed DPs and for DPs that contained proportional quantifiers (as opposed to cardinals). The optional acceptability of et-marked partitives ostensibly challenges the generally accepted view, according to which the distribution of et is categorically determined based on the two-way +/-definiteness opposition. We put forth a formal syntactic analysis that reconciles our findings with the definiteness approach.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85123319735&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.16995/GLOSSA.5729
DO - 10.16995/GLOSSA.5729
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85123319735
SN - 2397-1835
VL - 6
SP - 1
EP - 34
JO - Glossa
JF - Glossa
IS - 1
ER -