Complementation and Common Ground: Discursive effects in Biblical Hebrew
Camil Staps
December 2024 

Clausal connectives, such as complementizers or circumstantial markers, are highly grammaticalized functional elements. This article addresses the question whether part of their original meaning persists after grammaticalization has occurred: can a seemingly neutral clausal connective be semantically or pragmatically charged due to persisting meaning? It does this by discussing a case study of a highly polysemous clausal connective in Biblical Hebrew, ‫י‬‫͏כּ‬ִ /kī/. In particular, I argue that this clausal connective presupposes that the information content it introduces is in the Common Ground. Thus, /kī/ is used in three contexts: (a) to refer to discourse-old information, (b) to introduce information that the Addressee can accommodate, and (c) to present discourse-new information as part of the Common Ground, for discursive effect. The many different uses of /kī/ (introducing object and subject clauses as well as causal, temporal, conditional, adversative, concessive, and resultative circumstantial clauses) can then be derived from contextual clues given the general function of marking Common Ground. Furthermore, I argue that this function of /kī/ is related to its origin as a [+distal] deictic lexeme, for which I draw a parallel with English /that/. The analysis thus adds to a growing body of evidence for the possibility of employing referential features in the left periphery to express relations between interlocutors on the one hand and information content on the other.

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Reference:	lingbuzz/007711 (please use that when you cite this article)
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keywords:	complementizers; information status; common ground; [+distal]; biblical hebrew, semantics, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [November 2023]
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