Past Event: Monday Colloquium: The paradox of phrasal prepositions in Modern Hebrew (Hagit Borer; Queen Mary University of London)

Hagit Borer (QMUL) & Noam Faust (Paris 8, CNRS SFL)

Talk Abstract: Phrasal prepositions in Modern Hebrew with the sequence P+N(+Complement) comprise not only the frequently discussed locatives (the equivalents of English ‘in front (of)’) but hundreds of other possible combinations, with rich potential ‘lexical’ meaning (Content).  When it comes to their grammatical properties, we find that phonological, prosodic, Content, and syntactic properties do not align.  While the complex preposition itself (P+N) is a phonological unit and a Content unit, syntactically and prosodically, the structure is P+[N + Complement].  Utilizing a Span-based approach to both phonological realization and Content matching, we suggest that such mismatches are inherent to the grammatical representation.  Among other consequences, this means that attempts to syntactically define a unified domain for phonological realization and for Content are fundamentally on the wrong track, a conclusion also independently reached (at the very least) by Preminger (2021) and Adger (2024).