Citation

Hovav MR. Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics 2016; 84: 325-336.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016)

DOI

10.1163/9789004310896_025

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This article discusses a constructional idiom that has developed in recent Modern Hebrew, based on the Classical Hebrew collocation expressing the committing of suicide, with the verb replaced by an open position that can be filled by a wide range of verbs. It is argued that the development of the idiom involved a syntactic re-analysis of the original collocation whereby the PP is reanalyzed as a result PP and the reflexive is analyzed as a non-subcategorized NP. It is suggested that the idiom developed under the influence of a similar productive construction in English. The interpretation of the constructional idiom is briefly explored and comparison is made with another constructional idiom based on a group of native collocations under the influence of English. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 6.

Language: en

Keywords

Change of state; Collocation; Constructional idiom; Fake reflexive; Productivity; Reflexive; Resultative construction