THE HEBREW OBJECT MARKER AND SEMANTIC TYPE
Abstract
Proceedings of IATL 17
It is well-known that the object marker in Hebrew, et, is used only
in front of definite objects. In this paper I show that even though the
distribution of et is governed by a formal notion of definiteness
which is determined by syntactic factors, et itself is not semantically
vacuous. I discuss the phenomenon of "definiteness spreading" in construct
state nominals and show that this is not spreading of semantic definiteness.
Use of et in front of a CSN, however, blocks an indefinite reading
which would have been available otherwise. Other semantic effects of et
involve distributive readings of conjunctions and the interpretation of
wh-words and pseudoclefts. I propose that all these semantic effects
can be derived from the assumption that et acts as a type shifting
operator.
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