Adjectival passives in Hebrew evidence for parall

Authors: Aya MeltzerAsscher

Publish Date: 2011/06/16

Volume: 29, Issue: 3, Pages: 815-

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Abstract

This article focuses on Hebrew adjectival passives showing that as was claimed for other languages the class of adjectival passives in Hebrew is not homogenous but rather consists of two subclasses Former attempts to capture the nonhomogenous nature of the class of adjectival passives in different languages relied mainly on the existence versus absence of an event in their interpretation In contrast I argue that the criterion distinguishing the two subclasses of adjectival passives in Hebrew is the presence versus absence of an implicit Agent or Cause argument Thus the split parallels a very wellknown split in the verbal system—that between passive and unaccusative verbs Once this parallelism between the adjectival and the verbal systems is recognized it is possible to claim that the same valencechanging processes namely saturation and decausativization are operative in both systems This assumption can predict the syntactic and semantic behavior of the two subclasses of adjectives as well as their composition without resorting to operations unique to adjectival passive formationThis research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation grant 44/05 I would like to thank Tal Siloni and Julia Horvath for extremely helpful discussions throughout all stages of work on this topic and Irena Botwinik for insightful comments on several drafts of the paper I wish to also thank three anonymous NLLT reviewers as well as the audiences at the 22nd meeting of the Israeli Association for Theoretical Linguistics the Department Seminar of the English and Linguistics Department of BenGurion University and the TelAviv University Interdisciplinary Colloquium in Linguistics

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