Transitive verbs with non-accusative alternation in ... - Pluto Huji Ac Il

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Rivka Halevy
entity O, described above as signifying intention to go on with the action
or, in aspectual terms, extension of the ingressive into the durative (cf.
Section 2.1.2).
Finally, the focus on the contact (viz., giving the O a high profile) may
also become lexicalized. For instance, besides hika ‘hit’, which can
alternatively be construed in the accusative and in the prepositional,
Hebrew also has lexicalized verbs that incorporate the notion of contact
between the core participants in their lexical structure and are, therefore,
confined to the be- construction, e.g. paga’ ‘hit + cause harm’ and halam
‘strike with an heavy instrument’. In (45), hika be- can be replaced by the
nearly synonymous paga’ be- and halam be-, since all reflect the same
event structure and the same meaning-pattern, viz., imperfectivity, partcentered
view, intentionality, and so on.
(45) ha-de’a ha-kelalit hi’ še-hateroristim hiku bahem
mipney še-hem amerika’im (Haaretz, 13.9.01)
the-opinion the-general is that-the-terrorists struck in-them
because that-they-are Americans
‘The general opinion is that the terrorists struck them because they
were Americans’
5.2. Further syntactic properties of verbs of contact by motion
Further examination of the relation between the notions of ‘motion’ and
‘contact’ and the syntactic behavior of the transitive verbs at issue reveals
that, apart from the ‘et/be- alternation that is sensitive both to motion and
contact, other transitivity alternations are sensitive either to the notion of
‘contact’ or to the notions of ‘motion’ and ‘change of state’. 19 In what
follows, I shall examine four types of transitivity alternations: (1) body-part
possessor ascension; (2) inchoative alternation; (3) middle-passive
alternation; and (4) passivization.
5.2.1. Body-part possessor ascension
The construction of body-part possessor ascension is realized by ascension
of the body-part possessor to the position of a direct or indirect object
(usually encoded in the possessive dative le-) while moving the possessed
body-part to a tertiary position (in the sense of O. Jespersen), namely an
adverbial position. From the cognitive viewpoint it represents a whole-