Contrastive negation constructions in Israeli
Hebrew
A multimodal approach
This study explores the functions of Hebrew Contrastive Negation constructions (CNs), which are
usually considered grammatical patterns that combine the rejection of an accessible background assumption or an
accessible claim in the discourse via its substitution, with the two being construed as alternatives. The study
elaborates on discourse contexts that require the use of such constructions and shows that the pragmatics of CN
motivates not only the existence of the construction, but also the choice of the particular gestural patterns
coordinated with it. In line with recent developments of multimodal accounts of constructions (e.g., Lanwer, 2017; Schoonjans, 2017;
Steen & Turner, 2013; Zima
& Bergs, 2017), I propose that co-speech gestures should be viewed as an integral part of CNs in
Hebrew.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Data and methods
- 3.Contexts of use and gestural patterns
- 4.Idiosyncratic referential gestures
- 5.Referential distinction
- 6.Pragmatic gestures
- 7.Summary and concluding remarks
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
References
References (92)
References
André, E. et al. (2011). Non-verbal
persuasion and communication in an affective
agent. In R. Cowie, C. Pelachaud, & P. Petta (Eds.), Emotion-oriented
systems [Cognitive
Technologies] (pp. 585–608). Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer. 

Azar, M. (1999). Argumentative
structures. In R. Ben-Shahar, & G. Toury (Eds.), Hebrew — a
living
language, 2 (pp. 9–23). Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad. [In Hebrew]
Bardenstein, R. (2021). Persistent
argumentative discourse markers: The case of Hebrew rectification-marker be-ˁecem
(‘actually’). Journal of
Pragmatics, 172, 254–269. 

Bardenstein, R., & Ariel, M. (2019). Hebrew
Ela (‘but’) in the Mishnah and in Modern Hebrew. Balshanut Ivrit [Hebrew
Linguistics], 73, 45–61. [In Hebrew]
Barth-Weingarten, D. (2009). Contrasting
and turn transition: Prosodic projection with parallel-opposition
constructions. Journal of
Pragmatics, 41(11), 2271–2294. 

Bavelas, J. B., Chovil, N., Lawrie, D. A., & Wade, A. (1992). Interactive
gestures. Discourse
Processes, 15(4), 469–489. 

Bressem, J., & Müller, C. (2014). The
family of Away gestures: Negation, refusal, and negative
assessment. In C. Müller, A. Cienki, E. Fricke, S. H. Ladewig, D. McNeill, & J. Bressem (Eds.), Body — language — communication.
An international handbook on multimodality in human interaction (Handbooks of
Linguistics and Communication Science,
38.2) (pp. 1592–1604). Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. 

Bybee, J. L. (2006). From
usage to grammar: The mind’s response to
repetition. Language, 82(4), 711–733. 

Cienki, A. (2010). Multimodal
metaphor analysis. In L. Cameron, & R. Maslen (Eds.), Metaphor
analysis: Research practice in applied linguistics, social sciences and the
humanities (pp. 195–214). London: Equinox.
Cienki, A. (2021). From
the finger lift to the palm-up open hand when presenting a point: A methodological exploration of forms and
functions. Languages and
Modalities, 1, 17–30. 

Clift, R. (2020). Stability
and visibility in embodiment: The ‘Palm Up’ in interaction. Journal of
Pragmatics, 169, 190–205. 

Cooperrider, K. (2014). Body-directed
gestures: Pointing to the self and beyond. Journal of
Pragmatics, 71, 1–16. 

Cooperrider, K., Abner, N., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2018). The
Palm-Up puzzle: Meanings and origins of a widespread form in gesture and
sign. Frontiers in
Communication, 3. 

Couper-Kuhlen, E., & Selting, M. (2018). Interactional
linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Croft, W. (2001). Radical
Construction Grammar: Syntactic theory in typological
perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Deppermann, A. (2014). “Don’t
get me wrong”: Recipient design by using negation to constrain an action’s
interpretation. In S. Günthner, W. Imo, & J. Bücker (Eds.), Grammar
and dialogism: Sequential, syntactic, and prosodic patterns between emergence and
sedimentation (pp. 15–51). Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. 

Deppermann, A., & De Stefani, E. (2019). Defining
in talk-in-interaction: Recipient-design through negative definitional
components. Journal of
Pragmatics, 140, 140–155. 

Du Bois, J. W. (1985). Competing
motivations. In J. Haiman (Ed.), Iconicity
in
syntax (pp. 343–365). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 

Du Bois, J. W. (2007). The
stance triangle. In R. Englebretson (Ed.), Stance
taking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation,
interaction (pp. 139–182). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 

Fillmore, C. (1989). Grammatical
construction theory and the familiar
dichotomies. In R. Dietrich, & C. F. Graumann (Eds.), Language
processing in social
context (pp. 17–38). Amsterdam: North Holland/Elsevier. 

Fillmore, C. (1999). Inversion
and constructional inheritance. In G. Webelhuth, J. P. Koenig, & A. Kathol (Eds.), Lexical
and constructional aspects of linguistic
explanation (pp. 113–128). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Fillmore, C. J., Kay, P., & O’Connor, M. C. (1988). Regularity
and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions: The case of let
alone. Language, 64(3), 501–538. 

Fried, M., & Östman, J.-O. (2004). Construction
grammar: A thumbnail sketch. In M. Fried, & J.-O. Östman (Eds.), Construction
Grammar in cross-language perspective [Constructional Approaches to Language,
2] (pp. 11–86). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 

Fried, M., & Östman, J.-O. (2005). Construction
grammar and spoken language: The case of pragmatic particles. Journal of
Pragmatics, 37, 1752–1778. 

Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies
in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
Gates, Jr., D. L., & Seright, O. D. (1967). Negative-contrastive
constructions in standard modern English. American
Speech, 42(2), 136–141. 

Geva, Y., & Inbar, A. (forthcoming). The
Hand(s) on Heart gesture in Hebrew face-to-face interaction.
Goldberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions:
A Construction Grammar approach to argument
structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Goldberg, A. E. (2002). Surface
generalizations: An alternative to alternations. Cognitive
Linguistics, 13(4), 327–356. 

Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions
at work: The nature of generalization in
language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Goodwin, C. (2007). Environmentally
coupled gestures. In S. Duncan, J. Cassell, & E. Levy (Eds.), Gesture
and the dynamic dimensions of
language (pp. 195–212). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 

Gutiérrez Pérez, R. (2008). A
cross-cultural analysis of heart metaphors. Revista alicantina de Estudios
Ingleses, 21, 25–56. 

Haspelmath, M. (2006). Against
markedness (and what to replace it with). Journal of
Linguistics, 42(1), 25–70. 

Haspelmath, M. (2008). Frequency
vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical asymmetries. Cognitive
Linguistics, 19(1), 1–33. 

Heritage, J. (2012). Epistemics
in action: Action formation and territories of knowledge. Research on Language
and Social
Interaction, 45, 1–25. 

Heylen, D. (2005). Challenges
ahead: Head movements and other social acts in
conversation. In L. Halle, P. Wallis, S. Woods, S. Marsella, C. Pelachaud, & D. K. J. Heylen (Eds.), Proceedings
of the Joint Symposium on Virtual Social
Agents (pp. 45–52). The Society for the Study of Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour.
Hoffmann, T., & Trousdale, G. (Eds.) (2013). The
Oxford Handbook of Construction
Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Horn, L. R. (1985). Metalinguistic
negation and pragmatic
ambiguity. Language, 61(1), 121–174. 

Horn, L. R. (1989). A
natural history of
negation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Inbar, A. (2014). Toward
a logic of gestures. MA thesis. Tel Aviv University.
Inbar, A. (2017). Coordination
in gestures: From abstraction to perceptibility. 14th International Cognitive
Linguistics Conference (ICLC-14), University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia.
Inbar, A. (forthcoming-a). Visualizing
discourse functions: The analysis of gestures associated with List Constructions in Israeli
Hebrew.
Inbar, A. (forthcoming-b). Interactional
practices accomplished by pointing at the addressee in Hebrew face-to-face
interaction. In G. Brône, K. Feyaerts, E. Zima, and S. Ladewig (Eds.), Stance-taking
in embodied and virtual interaction (Frontiers in Psychology).
Inbar, A., & Cienki, A. (2021). The
raised index finger in Hebrew talk-in-interaction. 17th International
Pragmatics Conference (IPrA), Winterthur, Switzerland.
Inbar, A., & Maschler, Y. (2023). Shared
knowledge as an account for disaffiliative moves: Hebrew ki ‘because’-clauses accompanied by
the Palm Up Open Hand gesture. Research on Language and Social
interaction, 56(2), 141–164. 

Inbar, A., & Shor, L. (2019). Covert
negation in Israeli Hebrew: Evidence from co-speech gestures. Journal of
Pragmatics, 143, 85–95. 

Inbar, A., & Shor, L. (forthcoming). The
depiction of ‘negativity’: The case of the Brushing Hands gesture used by Hebrew
speakers. In F. Blanchette, & C. Lukyanenko (Eds.), Perspectives
on negation: Views from across the language sciences [Interdisciplinary
Linguistics]. Berlin: De Gruyter. 
Jasinskaja, K. (2012). Correction
by adversative and additive
markers. Lingua, 122(15), 1899–1918. 

Johnson, M. (1987). The
body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagination and
reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Kay, P. (2002). English
subjectless tagged
sentences. Language, 78, 453–481. 

Kay, P., & Fillmore, C. (1999). Grammatical
constructions and linguistic generalizations: The What’s X Doing Y?
construction. Language, 75(1), 1–33. 

Kendon, A. (1995). Gestures
as illocutionary and discourse structure markers in Southern Italian
conversation. Journal of
Pragmatics, 23, 247–279. 

Kendon, A. (2004). Gesture:
Visual action as
utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Kendrick, K. H., & Drew, P. (2016). Recruitment:
Offers, requests, and the organization of assistance in interaction. Research
on Language and Social
Interaction, 49(1), 1–19. 

Lakoff, R. (1971). If’s,
and’s, and but’s about conjunction. In C. J. Fillmore, & D. T. Langendoen (Eds.), Studies
in linguistic
semantics (pp. 115–150). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors
we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lanwer, J. P. (2017). Apposition:
A multimodal construction? The multimodality of linguistic constructions in the light of usage-based
theory. Linguistics
Vanguard, 3(s1). 

Lopez-Ozieblo, R. (2020). Proposing
a revised functional classification of pragmatic
gestures. Lingua, 247, 1–18. 

Mann, W., & Thompson, A. S. (1988). Rhetorical
structure theory: Towards a functional theory of text
organization. Text, 8(3), 243–281.
Marrese, O. H., Raymond, C. W., Fox, B. A., Ford, C. E., & Pielke, M. (2021). The
grammar of obviousness: The Palm-Up gesture in argument sequences. Frontiers in
Communication, 6. 

Maschler, Y., & Estlein, R. (2008). Stance-taking
in Hebrew causal conversation via be’emet (really, actually, indeed, lit. ‘in
truth’). Discourse
Studies, 10(3), 283–316. 

McCawley, J. (1991). Contrastive
negation and metalinguistic negation. Chicago Linguistic Society
(CLS), 27(2), 189–206.
McNeill, D. (1992). Hand
and mind. What gestures reveal about
thought. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Michaelis, L., & Lambrecht, K. (1996). Toward
a construction-based theory of language function: The case of nominal
extraposition. Language, 72, 215–247. 

Mondada, L. (2006). Challenges
of multimodality: Language and body in social interaction. Journal of
Sociolinguistics, 20(3), 336–366. 

Morris, D., Collett, P., Marsh, P., & O’Shaughnessy, M. (1979). Gestures.
Their origins and
distribution. London: Jonathan Cape.
Müller, C. (2004). Forms
and uses of the Palm Up Open Hand: A case of a gesture
family? In C. Müller, & R. Posner (Eds.), The
semantics and pragmatics of everyday
gestures (pp. 233–256). Berlin: Weidler Buchverlag.
Neumann, R. (2004). The
conventionalization of the Ring Gesture in German
discourse. In C. Müller, & R. Posner (Eds.), The
semantics and pragmatics of everyday
gestures (pp. 217–224). Berlin: Weidler Buchverlag.
Özyürek, A., Kita, S., Allen, S., Furman, R., & Brown, A. (2005). How
does linguistic framing of events influence co-speech gestures? Insights from crosslinguistic variations and
similarities. Gesture, 5(1/2), 219–240. 

Payrató, L., & Teꞵendorf, S. (2014). Pragmatic
gestures. In C. Müller, A. Cienki, E. Fricke, S. H. Ladewig, D. McNeill, & J. Bressem (Eds.), Body — language — communication.
An international handbook on multimodality in human interaction [Handbooks of
Linguistics and Communication Science,
38.2] (pp. 1531–1539). Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Rasmussen, G. (2014). Inclined
to better understanding — the coordination of talk and ‘leaning forward’ in doing
repair. Journal of
Pragmatics, 65, 30–45. 

Schoonjans, S. (2017). Multimodal
Construction Grammar issues are Construction Grammar issues. Linguistics
Vanguard, 3(s1). 

Shor, L. (2019). Negation
in Israeli Hebrew. In R. Berman (Ed.), Usage-based
studies in Modern
Hebrew (pp. 583–621). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 

Silvennoinen, O. (2013). Shaken,
not stirred: A Constructional Grammar account of contrastive negation in
English. MA thesis. University of Helsinki.
Silvennoinen, O. (2017). Not
only apples but also oranges: Contrastive negation and
register. In T. Hiltunen, J. McVeigh, & T. Säily (Eds.), Big
and rich data in English corpus linguistics: Methods and
explorations: Helsinki: VARIENG.
Silvennoinen, O. (2020). From
constructions to functions and back: Contrastive negation in English and
Finish. Folia
Linguistica, 54(1), 45–87. 

Spelke, E. S. (1985). Perception
of unity, persistence, and identity: Thoughts on infants’ conceptions of
objects. In J. Mehler, & R. Fox (Eds.), Neonate
cognition: Beyond the blooming, buzzing
confusion (pp. 89–113). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.
Spelke, E. S., Kestenbaum, R., Simons, D. J., & Wein, D. (1995). Spatiotemporal
continuity, smoothness of motion and object identity in infancy. British
Journal of Developmental
Psychology, 13(2), 113–142. 

Steen, F., & Tuner, M. (2013). Multimodal
construction grammar. In M. Borkent, B. Dancygier, & J. Hinnell (Eds.), Language
and the creative
mind (pp. 255–274). Stanford: CSLI Publications. 

Streeck, J. (1995). On
projection. In E. N. Goody (Ed.), Interaction
and social
intelligence (pp. 84–110). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Teꞵendorf, S. (2014). Pragmatic
and metaphoric — combining functional with cognitive approaches in the analyses of the Brushing Aside
Gesture. In C. Müller, A. Cienki, E. Fricke, S. H. Ladewig, D. McNeill, & J. Bressem (Eds.), Body — language — communication.
An international handbook on multimodality in human interaction [Handbooks of
Linguistics and Communication Science
38.2] (pp. 1540–1558). Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Verhagen, A. (2005). Constructions
of intersubjectivity: Discourse, syntax, and
cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
Zima, E., & Bergs, A. (2017). Multimodality
and construction grammar. Linguistics
Vanguard, 3(s1). 
