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Ditransitive idioms in Hebrew

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Abstract

This paper is a study of 55 ditransitive idioms in Hebrew, to the best of our knowledge, the first of its kind. The examination of these idiomatic constructions reveals asymmetries in their composition, thereby providing us with new insights into their internal structure and the principles governing their formation. In particular, we show that idioms reflect properties of their literal counterparts, explain word order patterns ditransitive idioms exhibit, argue that idioms do not have to be continuous constituents, and investigate the distribution of their free position. In addition, the paper provides support for Rappaport Hovav and Levin’s (2008) “verb sensitive” approach to the dative alternation and Landau’s (1994) seminal observation that Hebrew manifests the alternation, though it fails to mark it morphologically.

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Notes

  1. The context of relative clauses is often used in order to examine whether a verb governs le- or el. The reason for this is that in main clauses both pronominal le- and el cannot refer to inanimates (Francez 2006).

  2. Francez (2006) refers to verbs encoding a Caused Motion meaning as verbs encoding a Caused Change of Location meaning. Both terms are used in the literature.

  3. The Hebrew dictionaries we used are listed in the references section (see Cohen 1999; Fruchman et al. 2001; Levanon 1989–1990 and Rosenthal 2005).

  4. 15 native Hebrew speakers were consulted when in doubt (as will be detailed in fns. 8–10). In addition, speakers were informally consulted regarding the admissibility of argument order alternation for all idioms.

  5. These are cases subject to a manipulation of information structure that gives rise to a literal interpretation. Thus, the Goal-Theme order in (10b), for instance, involves focus on the Goal and loses the idiomatic meaning.

  6. An anonymous reviewer mentions Google examples such as (i) and (ii) as counterexamples to (10b) and (12b) respectively. All online examples accessed 14 October 2016.

    1. (i)
      figure i
    1. (ii)
      figure j

    To check the status of such examples we composed a questionnaire comprising (ia), (ib), (ii) and 17 fillers, asking speakers to rate the sentences as good/natural, not good/unnatural, or ‘in between’. The questionnaire was filled in by 15 speakers. Examples (ia) and (ii) were judged by 14 speakers as not good/unnatural; one speaker rated (1a) as ‘in between’, and one speaker judged (ii) as good/natural. Example (ib) was judged by 12 speakers as not good/unnatural, by two speakers as good, and by one speaker as ‘in between’. We believe that (ib) includes a Theme heavier than normally in the idiom, which allows it to undergo Heavy NP-shift; (ia) involves focus on ‘add to the fire’ marked by rak (‘only’), and in (iii) argument order was manipulated to allow the ‘medicine’ to be adjacent to its apposition ‘to initiate artificial selling’. For most speakers such manipulations sound unnatural.

  7. Sentence (13b) is marked by */?? because 4 native speakers out of 15 reported that they could get the idiomatic meaning even in this Goal-Theme order, but would not use it in this specific word order. Google searches did not find instances of (13b) in Goal-Theme order, except for instances manipulated by Heavy NP-Shift, as in (i) and (ii) (also mentioned by an anonymous reviewer). The heavy Theme appears in brackets. (The meaning of the idiom changes depending on whether or not the Theme is animate ((i) vs. (ii)), as mentioned in fn. 32.)

    1. (i)
      figure n
    1. (ii)
      figure o

  8. Occasionally, idiom dictionaries do not specify the free Goal.

  9. Reviewers raised two potential types of counterexamples to the restriction in (22). One type involves examples with verbs such as cause and permit, as illustrated in (i, ii).

    1. (i)

      I caused the cat to get out of the bag.

    2. (ii)

      …but as a rule custom was too strong to permit the ice to be broken.  (Colquhoun 1902:29)

    These verbs, however, do occur in ECM constructions, as illustrated in (iii, iv) (thanks to Louise McNally for providing (iv)).

    1. (iii)

      I caused there to be total silence.  (McCawley 1988, p. 70 (12a))

    2. (iv)

      The trademark law permits there to be both an American insurance Company and an American Airlines as well as…  (Hall 2002:663)

    The second type of counterexample involves relative clauses whose head is part of the fixed material of an idiom occurring within the relative clause, as in (v).

    1. (v)

      He knew of the boy from the tabs they kept on the Slayer and her group.   (http://www.tthfanfic.org/Story-28812/cloudleonsgurl+Don+t+You+Hurt+My+Girl.htm)

    The availability of idiomatic interpretation in cases such as (v) has been discussed in the literature together with other phenomena requiring the interpretation of the head of the relative within the relative clause (low interpretation), e.g., anaphor binding, the availability of de dicto reading etc. These phenomena are known as reconstruction effects. The raising analysis of relative clauses straightforwardly explains the effects. Under the raising analysis, the relative clause is the CP-complement of D, and the head of the relative clause originates within the relative and raises to its SpecCP, as schematized in (vi) (see Bianchi 1999; Bhatt 2002; Sichel 2014, and references therein for more discussion). Under the raising analysis, kept tabs in (v) is expected to have its idiomatic interpretation because tabs receives its semantic role idiom internally, as shown in (vi).

    1. (vi)

      …[DP the [CP tabsi [ they kept t i on…]]].

  10. Given Nunberg et al. (1994) claim that non-decomposable idioms allow neither raising nor passivization, one could suggest that the irrelevance of decomposability for argument word order in ditransitive idioms constitutes evidence that the dative alternation does not result from movement, as movement would be blocked in non-decomposable idioms. We will not pursue the matter any further here. We note nonetheless that among our non-decomposable idioms, there are idioms that do allow passive movement (e.g., (i, ii)). See also Punske and Stone (2014) for discussion of the passivizability of idioms.

    1. (i)
      figure y
    1. (ii)
      figure z

  11. Three apparent counterexamples to generalization (25b) are discussed at the end of this subsection.

  12. The sentence is grammatical only if the Goal argument (London) is interpreted metonymically as an institution, such as the London office, which can allow a Recipient/Possessor interpretation.

  13. This also explains the rarity of Agents, which are predominantly human, in the fixed parts of idioms (Marantz 1984; Kiparsky 1987; Nunberg et al. 1994; Horvath and Siloni 2016).

  14. There are two apparent counterexamples to generalization (35b). The idioms in (i) and (ii), which are Open-Goal (Fixed-Theme) idioms, are headed by the Caused Motion verbs hixnis (‘put into/let in’) and hifna (‘turn to’), respectively. On a second glance, however, it becomes clear that hixnis (‘put into’) and hifna (‘turned to’) in (i) and (ii) respectively denote a Caused Possession meaning. That is, the verbs have undergone semantic drift under the metaphoric transfer. This claim is supported by the fact that they use the pronominal le (iii, iv), which Caused Motion verbs disallow. Further, hixnis (‘put into’) in (i) can be replaced by the Caused Possession verb natan (‘gave’) and the Ambiguous verb hevi (‘brought’ and in colloquial Hebrew also ‘gave’).

    1. (i)

      hixnis/

      natan/

      hevi

      le-

      x

      makot

      put into

      gave/

      brought

      to

      x

      blows

      ‘beat x’

    2. (ii)

      hifna

      le-x

      et

      ha-

      gav/

      oref

      turned

      to x

      ACC

      the

      back/

      nape

      ‘turned his back on x’

    3. (iii)

      ha-iš

      še-

      ha-

      ganav

      hixnis

      lo

      makot…

      the man

      that

      the

      thief

      put into

      to.him

      blows

      ‘the man that the thief hit…’

    4. (iv)

      ha-

      iš

      še-

      kulam

      hifnu

      lo

      et

      ha- gav…

      the

      man

      that

      everybody

      turned

      to.him

      ACC

      the back

      ‘the man who everybody turned their back on…’

    The idiom in (ii) has an additional instantiation, in which the verb does have a Caused Motion meaning, as will be illustrated in (42), (43) and discussed thereafter.

  15. There are also isolated instances of Open-Goal (Fixed-Theme) idioms headed by a Caused Possession verb involving a [−human] Goal capable of possession, e.g., idioms (48) and (50) in the Appendix. This is also expected if (37) is a tendency, not an absolute principle.

  16. Independently of idioms, a range of factors such as heaviness and information structure have been argued to affect variant choice in the dative alternation; for discussion, see Bresnan et al. (2007), Rappaport Hovav and Levin (2008) and references therein.

  17. Bruening (2010:536, fn. 14) mentions only two examples of full ditransitive idioms in English: give the devil/him his due (‘acknowledge the positive qualities of a person who is unpleasant’) and send/carry coals to Newcastle (‘do something redundant’), suspecting they may be partial idioms owing to the substitutability of one of their constituents.

  18. As discussed in Sect. 2.2, an idiom is considered decomposable if it is isomorphic with its meaning, in the sense that each of its constituents corresponds to an element of its meaning. A non-decomposable idiom is not isomorphic with its meaning; that is, its idiomatic interpretation cannot be mapped onto the different constituents of the idiom. Idioms that exhibit only partial mapping between constituents and meaning are not considered decomposable here. As far as the internal arguments are concerned, we require matching in neither categorial status nor internal structure, between idiom and meaning. Despite these guidelines, classifying idioms into decomposable and non-decomposable is not always straightforward. Nonetheless, we believe the picture emerging here motivates the conclusion that the decomposability property is irrelevant to the choice of linear order of internal arguments in Goal-ditransitive idioms. Finally, often, in addition to the translation of the Hebrew idiom, we also mention the parallel English idiom. The property of decomposability should of course not be checked against the English idiom.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Grant No 2009269 from the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF). For helpful comments and discussions, we are grateful to Julia Horvath, Irena Botwinik, Shir Givoni, Dganit Jenia Kim, and Dana Idan. We also thank five anonymous NLLT reviewers and Louise McNally for their useful remarks. Finally, thanks to the audiences at the Tel Aviv University Interdisciplinary Colloquium (February 2012, Israel), and at the Workshop on Relative Clauses and Idioms (November 2014, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany), where parts of this work have been presented.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Yael Mishani-Uval & Tal Siloni

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  1. Yael Mishani-Uval
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Correspondence to Tal Siloni.

Appendix: Ditransitive idioms in Hebrew

Appendix: Ditransitive idioms in Hebrew

All idioms collected for this study are listed below in Hebrew alphabetical order. The argument order in which they appear here is the same as listed in idiom dictionaries. The idioms of each type are also divided into decomposable and non-decomposable idioms.Footnote 18

1. :

Full ditransitive idioms

  1. 1.1

    Decomposable idioms

  1. (1)
    figure av
  1. (2)
    figure aw
  1. (3)
    figure ax
  1. (4)
    figure ay
  1. (5)
    figure az
  1. (6)
    figure ba
  1. (7)
    figure bb
  1. 1.2

    Non-decomposable idioms

  1. (8)
    figure bc
  1. (9)
    figure bd
  1. (10)
    figure be
  1. (11)
    figure bf
  1. (12)
    figure bg
  1. (13)
    figure bh
  1. (14)
    figure bi
  1. (15)
    figure bj
  1. (16)
    figure bk
2. :

Fixed - Goal ( Open - Theme ) ditransitive idioms

  1. 2.1

    Decomposable idioms

  1. (17)
    figure bl
  1. (18)
    figure bm
  1. (19)
    figure bn
  1. (20)
    figure bo
  1. (21)
    figure bp
  1. (22)
    figure bq
  1. 2.2

    Non-decomposable idioms

  1. (23)
    figure br
  1. (24)
    figure bs
  1. (25)
    figure bt
  1. (26)
    figure bu
  1. (27)
    figure bv
  1. (28)
    figure bw
  1. (29)
    figure bx
  1. (30)
    figure by
  1. (31)
    figure bz
  1. (32)
    figure ca
3. :

Open Goal (Fixed - Theme) ditransitive idioms

  1. 3.1

    Decomposable idioms

  1. (33)
    figure cb
  1. (34)
    figure cc
  1. (35)
    figure cd
  1. (36)
    figure ce
  1. (37)
    figure cf
  1. (38)
    figure cg
  1. (39)
    figure ch
  1. (40)
    figure ci
  1. 3.2

    Non-decomposable idioms

  1. (41)
    figure cj
  1. (42)
    figure ck
  1. (43)
    figure cl
  1. (44)
    figure cm
  1. (45)
    figure cn
  1. (46)
    figure co
  1. (47)
    figure cp
  1. (48)
    figure cq
  1. (49)
    figure cr
  1. (50)
    figure cs
  1. (51)
    figure ct
  1. (52)
    figure cu
  1. (53)
    figure cv
  1. (54)
    figure cw
  1. (55)
    figure cx

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Mishani-Uval, Y., Siloni, T. Ditransitive idioms in Hebrew. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 35, 715–749 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-016-9354-8

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