Clause Structure and Word Order in Hebrew and Arabic: An Essay in Comparative Semitic Syntax (review)

Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 267 Reviews CLAUSE STRUCTURE AND WORD ORDER IN HEBREW AND ARABIC: AN ESSAY IN COMPARATIVE SEMITIC SYNTAX. By Ur Shlonsky. Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax. pp. x + 289. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997. Cloth, $75.00. In this learned and carefully-written book, Ur Shlonsky adopts the Principles and Parameters model of Generative Grammar developed by Noam Chomsky to study key components of Semitic language systems. While most of his analysis is concerned with modem Hebrew, he devotes some attention to Arabic, a language rarely studied from the generative point of view. He is interested in the internal structure of the functional layer of the languages and attempts to address two related questions: 1) what is the actual content of this layer?; and 2) what is the hierarchy of functional projections within it? The fIrst of the book's three parts is concerned with verb movement and clausal architecture. It includes a fIne discussion of the place and function of the Benoni, or participial, form in Hebrew. Shlonsky offers a revision of the theory of participles by suggesting that their scope of movement is not limited to the lower part of clauses, but rather, they are hybrid forms as verbs whose agreement features are participial but which raise to tense status. He presents an informative treatment of negation of the present tense in both Hebrew and Arabic and explains well the more complex system of Arabic which has variants for the negative particle la in the future (Ian) and perfect (lam). His analysis of Arabic clause structure and its different forms of negation leads Shlonsky to conclude that, unlike Hebrew, two distinct participles exist in Arabic, one verbal/imperfect and the other nominal. Part Two begins with a study of null subjects (subject pronouns that must be understood because they are not phonetically expressed) and attempts to explain why differences in their use exist between Hebrew and Arabic. Hebrew seems to violate the general principle which holds that the richer the morphological system of a language is, the more likely it is to allow for null subjects. Its conjugation system is highly developed and yet null subjects are not allowed in the third person in Hebrew. To complicate matters, Palestinian Arabic, which has a conjugation system almost identical to that of Hebrew, does allow for null subjects. Shlonsky offers an explanation of this situation by discussing the distinction between the third person pronoun and the first and second person pronouns in Hebrew. While the former is inherently impersonal and therefore incompatible with referential interpretation, fIrst and second person pronouns cannot be impersonal and are fully referential. Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 268 Reviews Word order is treated in the book's second part in a chapter on subjectverb inversion. Drawing on work done previously by himself and others, Shlonsky distinguishes between triggered inversion, which is due to the presence of some preverbal element like a prepositional phrase or complement , and free inversion which requires no such trigger. In the former case, Hebrew subjects are not case-licensed in their thematic position, but when free inversion is found subjects are case-licensed. This difference is due to the fact that free inversion can only be present when the verb is intransitive and passive and, therefore, does not assign an external theta-role, that is, does not allow for a specific direct object. (Theta-role refers to the assignment ofspecific semantic content to a particular word. For example, the word "it" in the sentence "It was raining" would not occupy a theta, or thematic position.) Although he does not discuss evidence from Arabic in this section. Shlonsky does investigate the use of postverbal subjects in French and Italian. He does so in order to support his theory that postverbal subjects in Romance languages are in the Verb Phrase while clausal subjects in Hebrew occupy the highest available Specifier position within the Inflectional Phrase. The lack of attention to Arabic on this matter is unfortunate since the reader is left wondering if this phenomenon is one that is peculiar to Hebrew or is found elsewhere in the Semitic family. The third part of the book studies the pronominal...