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Usage-Based Studies in Modern Hebrew: Background, Morpho-lexicon, and Syntax
Edited by Ruth A. Berman
[Studies in Language Companion Series 210] 2020
► pp. 583–622

Chapter 16
Negation in Modern Hebrew

| The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This chapter examines the expression of negation in spontaneous spoken Modern Hebrew. It provides a quantitative description of syntactic negation in the Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH) to address syntactic, pragmatic, and prosodic properties of negation. The study shows that in addition to the prototypical function of rejection and denial, negative utterances are used for mitigating evaluations, implying the desirability of a state/event, and strengthening the speaker’s claim by rejecting potential counter-arguments. Moreover, the prosodic prominence of negators may be influenced by cognitive and interactional motivations. Particular attention is paid to phenomena that usually remain unaddressed in descriptions of negation, such as negative sentences with extra-sentential scope, negation-based discourse markers, and non-linguistic negation.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and methodology
  • 3.Quantitative results
  • 4.Wide-scope negation
    • 4.1The negator ‘lo’
    • 4.2The negator ‘al’
    • 4.3The negator ‘en’
  • 5.Narrow-scope negation
    • 5.1Contrastive negation
    • 5.2Preposing
  • 6.Negative indefinites
  • 7.Negation and prosody
  • 8.Negation-based discourse markers
  • 9.Non-linguistic negation
  • 10.Concluding comments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 March 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.210.17sho
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