Towards a Description of Spoken Hebrew

The study of spoken Hebrew has been picking up over the past decades. In this paper, I try to present some methodological difficulties arising when trying to present a comprehensive description of spoken language in general and spoken Hebrew in particular: difficulties in terminology, in the subjects under discussion, in the registers of spoken language, and in the construction of the corpus. Finally, I suggest a framework for a comprehensive description of linguistic phenomena in spoken language. In particular, I indicate the need to distinguish among phenomena of production, phenomena of grammar, and those in between the two, while demonstrating this sort of scale with three linguistic phenomena: the definiteness of the construct phrases, subject-verb agreement, and abbreviated utterances.

It is important to recognize this scale since many phenomena have under-gone the transition from production phenomena to grammatical phenomena, and therefore identifying the production phenomena might show us the way in which some linguistic rules are formed.