Nonactive Voice in Hebrew and Elsewhere: Between Unaccusativity and Agentivity
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Abstract
Two verbal templates in Modern Hebrew allow for any kind of verbal construction, except for a simple transitive verb. Unaccusatives, reflexives, reciprocals and unergatives that take an obligatory indirect object are all attested, but transitive verbs are not allowed. I discuss what the morphology of these templates actually signals, given that external arguments and internal arguments are both possible. Working in Distributed Morphology, I propose that a number of functional heads conspire to produce the existing alternations in argument structure, with implications for theories of anticausativization, reflexivization and reciprocalization.