Hebrew Linguistics

The Nominal Sentence in Rabbi Judah Ibn-Tibbon’s translation of Duties of the Hearts

Barak Avirbach — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Many scholars have focused on the nominal sentence in Hebrew, examining its various manifestations across different periods. These scholars have investigated word order, the place and function of the separate personal pronoun, the conjugation of the verb “to be” (היה), the various types of third members in extended models, nominal sentence models (including modal and existential sentences, in the context of a broader definition of the nominal sentence where the predicate is not a verb), the development of the nominal sentence through the different strata of the Hebrew language, etc.

This article will present the nominal sentence as it is reflected in Rabbi Judah Ibn-Tibbon’s translation of Rabbi Bahya Ibn-Paquda’s Duties of the Hearts. The analysis will be approached from three perspectives: (a) a diachronic study—comparing patterns of the nominal sentence in the Bible and in the Mishnah to those found in Duties of the Hearts; (b) an examination of Arabized Hebrew in medieval texts, comparing the nominal sentence structures in the research literature with those in Duties of the Hearts; and (c) a comparative study—contrasting occurrences of the nominal sentence in Ibn-Tibbon’s translation with their counterparts in the original Arabic text. This research marks the first stage in a broader effort to provide a new comprehensive syntactic description of Arabized Hebrew.

'The Feminism Police Won't Tell Me': Fictional Quotations as a Means for Confrontational Ideological Positioning

Miri Cohen-Achdut — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines the pragmatic function of fictional quotations as a means for ideological positioning in a controversial 2018 interview between journalist Sharon Shpurer and Knesset member Merav Michaeli. The core conflict revolves around negotiating the definition of “who is a feminist,” with each participant attempting to position herself as more consistent. Adopting a functional-discursive approach to quotation analysis, I demonstrate how participants use fictional quotations not to report prior speech events but to challenge each other’s feminist credentials and establish second-order positioning. The analysis reveals various strategies: quoting ideological authorities, creating potential utterances that establish feminist ideals the other fails to meet, using double-voiced quotations echoing extreme views, and constructing dialogues where one reformulates the other’s statements. Notably, these quotations rarely serve for initial challenging but primarily function to reject initial positioning and establish counter-positioning. Despite the confrontational nature of the exchange, the quotations simultaneously reveal deep ideological alignment about feminist principles. This study contributes to pragmatic-linguistic research by illuminating how quotations encode ideology and examining linguistic patterns characteristic of feminist discourse during the Me Too era.

Vocabulary Assessment in Hebrew as a Second Language to Arab Learners using the Lexical Diversity Measure

Eihab Abu-Rabiah — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article tests the progress of Arabic speakers in the acquisition of written Hebrew vocabulary as a second language (L2), focusing on the lexical diversity measure. This measure is used to assess vocabulary range by testing the proportion of different words in a spoken or written text. This index is an important indicator of the learner’s language range and linguistic repertoire. It was originally developed in English and applied to Hebrew in previous studies using similar methodology, despite English being a more analytical language than Hebrew. The purpose of the paper is to present three methods (applications) of this index that are adapted to varying degrees to the semantic, morphological and orthographic characteristics of Hebrew, as well as to point out the advantages and limitations of each approach. In addition, it will also explore the effects of differences between each approach on the assessment of vocabulary acquisition. Furthermore, it will examine lexical diversity in relation to the increase in time spent acquiring L2.

This index was tested in Hebrew essays of Bedouin high school students at the beginning of the 11th grade and a year later according to three methods of assessing lexical diversity: classical, total, and automatic. Differences between the methods are based on the fact that it is not trivial to define a word, therefore, a division of the orthographic unit into its lexical and functional components is proposed for the total lexical diversity method. The two main advantages of this method: an adequate representation of the role of a word, and the frequency of a word in the text. Although these three methods found no significant increase in lexical diversity with the increase in the acquisition time of Hebrew as L2 to Arabic, statistically significant differences between the three methods of lexical diversity were identified. Furthermore, a negative correlation was observed between the values obtained in the results, and the level of adaptation of the methods in accordance with the characteristics of Hebrew.

Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Modern Hebrew: Empirical Findings

Aviya Hacohen, Olga Kagan, Dana Plaut-Forckosh — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This paper investigates Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Modern Hebrew. The consensus in the theoretical literature has been that the Modern Hebrew object marker et is licensed only with definite direct objects. Our study examines whether this distribution extends to partitive nominals, and whether additional factors – such as quantifier type and object position – affect the acceptability of et in partitive contexts. In a preliminary web search, we observed numerous naturally occurring examples of et-marked partitive DPs, most frequently involving proportional quantifiers and appearing in sentence-initial position. To test whether these naturally occurring tokens represent current patterns of Modern Hebrew grammar, we asked 41 native Hebrew speakers to evaluate the acceptability of sentences containing et-marked object DPs using a 5-point scale. The experiment included three independent variables: partitivity (partitive vs. non-partitive), quantifier type (proportional vs. cardinal), and object position (base vs. sentence-initial). Our results show that speakers assign considerably high acceptability scores for sentences with indefinite partitive DPs (M = 3.6/5), especially when the DP is headed by a proportional quantifier (M = 3.72/5) and appears in sentence-initial position (M = 3.71/5). These data challenge the widely held view that et is only licensed with definite direct objects. This paper expands and deepens the empirical and theoretical discussion of DOM in Modern Hebrew and contextualizes the experimental findings within crosslinguistic DOM literature.

Addressing the Reader as an Expression of Dialogism in Ramban's Commentary on Genesis

Elior Babian — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article discusses part of Ramban's commentary on Genesis from the perspective of dialogism, examining its linguistic expressions in the commentary with a focus on addressing the reader. The article begins with an introduction to the theory of dialogism and the scholarly research literature written on dialogism in Hebrew texts, as well in the review of Ramban’s language in his commentary on the Torah.

As an expression of dialogism in Ramban's language, three verb forms were examined that may include an address to the reader: first-person plural, second-person singular, and third-person singular. It was found that Ramban uses these verb forms to involve the reader in the process of interpretation, to predict the reader's thoughts and reactions, to distinguish between his own opinion and the opinions of earlier commentators, and more.

These uses correspond with the argumentative nature of Ramban's commentary, and it seems that through them, he seeks to persuade the reader about his interpretative suggestions.

At the end of the article, ideas for further research are proposed.

A Time Capsule: Change and Preservation in a Hebrew Speaker’s Language over Fifty Years

Evyatar Cohen, Einat Gonen — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article presents a panel study examining the language of a single speaker over a span of 51 years. The speaker, born in Palestine in the early 20th century, represents a linguistic model of an Ashkenazi native speaker from the first generation of Modern Hebrew. He was recorded twice: once in 1960 and again in 2011, speaking freely about his life for approximately two hours at each point in time. The study compares these recordings, analyzing morphological and syntactic features common to both periods, and identifies trends of change and preservation across a fifty-year lifespan.