Adjectival genitive constructions in Modern Hebrew: A case study in coanalysis

Abstract

The adjectival genitive construction in Modern Hebrew is similar in its internal syntactic structure to the construct-state construction. Being adjectival, it functions as a predicate which involves, semantically, the binding of an implicit possessor argument of a structure internal noun. It is shown that the process of predicate formation in this construction could not be the result of the familiar syntactic mechanism of operator-variable binding. Rather, predicate formation is made possible by a simultaneous analysis (coanalysis) of this construction as a morphological construction, thereby making possible the application of certain word-internal processes