Prepositions, prefixes, conjunctions and particles

This chapter covers the small words of Modern Hebrew: the prepositions and how they take pronoun suffixes (li 'to me', alav 'on him'); the one-letter prefixes ו ה ש ב כ ל מ, which are written as part of the next word, their order and their vowels; the accusative marker את and its inflected forms (oti, otkha …); compound prepositions; the conjunctions; and the adverbs and particles that carry focus and attitude (gam, rak, kvar, dávka, bikhlal, pashut, mamash, harey). The discourse particles of speech (kaze, yaani, áha, nu, yála) are only listed here and treated fully in 9. Pragmatics and politeness. Nouns, pronouns and possessive suffixes are in Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals; clause syntax (object marking, relatives, questions, negation) in 7. Syntax; how UD splits these words into tokens in 11. Modern Hebrew in Universal Dependencies. Index: Modern Hebrew (he): a reference manual for Mova.

Transliteration and glossing follow 2. Script and spelling: kh = /χ/, ts = צ, sh = ש, stress marked only when not final (lánu, otánu), prefixes joined by a hyphen (be-bayit, ba-báyit). Leipzig abbreviations: ACC, DEF, GEN, CS, 1SG, 3PL.M etc.

1. Prepositions take pronoun suffixes

Hebrew has no free object pronouns after prepositions. Where English says to him, with me, about them, Hebrew fuses the preposition and the pronoun into one word: lo, iti, aleyhem. These "inflected prepositions" are among the most frequent words of the language (Wikipedia, Modern Hebrew grammar, "Prepositions"; Glinert 2017).

נתתי לו את הספר.
natáti lo et ha-séfer
give.PST.1SG to.3SG.M ACC DEF-book
'I gave him the book.'

דיברנו עליהם כל הערב.
dibárnu aleyhem kol ha-érev
speak.PST.1PL about.3PL.M all DEF-evening
'We talked about them all evening.'

Prepositions fall into two inflection series, by the shape of their suffixes. The singular-type series uses the suffixes of a singular noun (-i, -kha, -o …; compare sifri 'my book'). The plural-type series uses the suffixes of a plural noun (-ay, -ékha, -av …; compare sfaray 'my books'), because these prepositions were historically plural nouns or took a -y- linking element. The series is a lexical property of each preposition and must be listed.

In the full spelling (ktiv male) the two series are often told apart only by a yod: עליו alav 'on him' has a yod before the -v, while לו lo 'to him' does not.

2. Singular-type prepositions

2.1 ל- 'to, for' and ב- 'in, at, with'

The two most frequent prepositions are single-letter prefixes before nouns but full words with suffixes.

Notes:

• לו lo 'to him' and לא lo 'not' sound the same and are a classic spelling error (lo 'not' is written with aleph).
• לך is lekha (M) or lakh (F); the spelling does not tell (pointing does: לְךָ / לָךְ). The same holds for בך and every 2SG suffix (-ך).
• In speech, bahem is often levelled for feminine reference, as with all feminine plural forms (see Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals, §8.1).

The dative ל- marks the recipient (natáti lo), the experiencer of states (kar li 'I'm cold', lit. 'cold to me'; nim'as li 'I'm fed up'), the possessor in existential sentences (yesh li 'I have', lit. 'there is to me'), and the "ethical dative" of interest (hu halakh lo 'off he went', lit. 'he went to him'). See 7. Syntax on yesh/eyn and possession.

קר לי.
kar li
cold.M.SG to.1SG
'I'm cold.'

2.2 של 'of' (possession)

של is historically ש- 'that' + ל- 'to', and its inflection is that of ל- with she- in front. It is the everyday possessive: ha-báyit sheli 'my house'. It also predicates possession: ha-séfer ha-ze shelkha? 'is this book yours?'. The bound possessive suffixes and the double genitive are described in Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals, §4.6 and §6.

Ambiguity: the written form שלו is usually shelo 'his', but can also be she-lu 'that if only' or she-lo 'that not' (written שלא, so only in errors) and she-lo 'that to him'. The IAHLT treebanks (UD 2.18) contain all three analyses: של + ו (shelo, 85 times as nmod:poss or nmod), ש + לו (she-lu, as two mark), and ש + ל + ו (she-lo 'that to him'); counted 2026-10-17.

2.3 את: the accusative marker

The object marker את et comes before a definite direct object (see 7. Syntax and Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals, §5.3). With a pronoun it changes its stem to ot-:

ראיתי אותה אתמול.
ra'íti ota etmol
see.PST.1SG ACC.3SG.F yesterday
'I saw her yesterday.'

אני אוהב אתכם.
ani ohev etkhem
I love.PRS.M.SG ACC.2PL.M
'I love you (all).'

Notes:

• The 2PL etkhem/etkhen is the normative form; otkhem is common in speech and is accepted by many.
• אותו oto also means 'the same': oto davar 'the same thing', ota ha-isha 'the same woman', otam ha-anashim 'the same people'. Here it is a determiner before a noun, not an object pronoun. In UD this use is DET (PronType=Dem), while the object oto is a multiword token ADP + PRON (§9).
• The suffixed forms of את are full pronouns: they can be stressed, coordinated and fronted (oti hu lo ra'a 'me he didn't see').
• Classical Hebrew also had את et 'with' (iti 'with me' comes from it; §2.4). Modern Hebrew uses את as 'with' only in fixed Biblical phrases.
• Homographs. Unpointed את is also at 'you (F.SG)'. A tagger must decide from the next word: et is followed by a definite noun phrase, at by a predicate or verb.

2.4 עם 'with' → איתי

עם im 'with' takes suffixes on a different stem, it- (historically from את 'with'):

The forms with it- are the everyday ones; the forms on im- are literary and liturgical (ha-shem imkha 'the Lord is with you'). Iti is spelled with or without yod (איתי / אתי); the full spelling with yod is the Academy's rule for unpointed text (Academy 2017).

אתה בא איתנו?
ata ba itánu?
you come.PRS.M.SG with.1PL
'Are you coming with us?'

2.5 מן / מ- 'from'

מן min (before the article, and in fixed phrases) and the prefix מ- mi-/me- 'from, than' have irregular suffixed forms with a doubled stem:

ממנו miménu is both 'from him' and 'from us'; to avoid the ambiguity modern speakers say me-itánu 'from (with) us' or mi-ménu only for 'him'.

מ- also means 'than' in comparisons: hu gavóha miméni 'he is taller than me'. With the article it does not fuse: me-ha-báyit 'from the house' (contrast ba-báyit, §5.3).

2.6 כמו 'like, as'

The prefix כ- ke- 'as, like' takes no suffixes in Modern Hebrew; כמו kmo replaces it with pronouns. Colloquially kmo also combines with a free pronoun (kmo hu 'like him') or with she-: kmo she-amárti 'as I said'. Kamókha survives in the fixed ve-ahavta le-re'akha kamókha 'love your neighbour as yourself' and kamókha? 'someone like you'. See also the slang kaze 'like this, kind of' in §7.4.

2.7 Other singular-type prepositions

The full 2nd person and 1PL forms follow the pattern of ל- above: etslekha, etslekh, etslénu, etslekhem, etslekhen; bishvilkha, bishvilekh, bishvilénu, bishvilkhem.

3. Plural-type prepositions

3.1 על 'on, about', אל 'to(wards)'

The 2PL and 3PL of אל are pronounced with a- (aleykhem) in normal speech, like those of על, so they merge in sound; in pointed text they differ (אֲלֵיכֶם / עֲלֵיכֶם). The greeting shalom aleykhem is על.

על is the general 'on' and 'about' (sipur al ahava 'a story about love'), marks the object of many verbs (hishpía al 'influenced', shamar al 'guarded', vitér al 'gave up'), and forms a host of idioms (al yad 'next to', al-pi 'according to', al menat 'in order to'). אל 'to, towards' is mostly formal; speech uses ל- (halákhti el ha-rofe (formal) / la-rofe 'I went to the doctor'), but elay 'to me' is common with verbs of motion and speaking: hu pana elay 'he turned to me'.

3.2 אחרי 'after', לפני 'before'

Both are also conjunctions with ש-: akharey she-, lifney she- 'after/before (doing)'. Lifney is temporal and spatial ('in front of', formal); speech uses mi-lifney or mul for 'in front of'. 'Ago' is lifney: lifney shalosh shanim 'three years ago'.

3.3 תחת 'under' and בין 'between'

בין is mixed: singular-type in the singular, plural-type in the plural (the forms above match the Wiktionary table in kaikki.org's Hebrew dictionary). 'Between X and Y' is beyn X le-Y or beyn X u-veyn Y (formal, with the preposition repeated): beyni le-veynekha 'between me and you'. Beynéynu is also 'between us' = 'frankly' in speech.

תחת is formal; speech uses מתחת ל- mitákhat le- 'below', which takes the suffixes of ל-: mitákhat lo 'under him'. תחת also means 'instead of' in formal style.

3.4 Other plural-type prepositions

4. The inseparable prefixes ו ה ש ב כ ל מ

4.1 The seven letters

Seven one-letter function words are written together with the next word, with no space and no hyphen. Hebrew grammar teaches them with the mnemonic moshe ve-khalev (משה וכלב, 'Moses and Caleb'), whose letters are מ ש ה ו כ ל ב:

Also prefixed in writing, as a combination of these: כש- kshe- 'when' (כ + ש), מש- mi-she- 'from (the time) that', לכש- likhshe- 'when (in future)' (formal), and the Aramaic-origin conjunction ד- in a few fixed words.

4.2 Order

When several prefixes stack, their order is fixed (Glinert 2017; Tsarfaty 2006 uses this as a constraint on segmentation):

ו → ש / כש → ב / כ / ל / מ → ה → stem

Up to four or five prefix letters can stack in formal writing (וכשמהבית is possible but strained). Each one adds ambiguity: a word starting with ו, ה, ש, ב, כ, ל or מ may be a prefix + a word, or a word whose first letter is that letter. A classic example is the word-form בצל, which is batsal 'onion' (one word) or be-tsel / ba-tsel 'in (the) shadow' (ב + צל). Tsarfaty et al. (2019) and Seker et al. (2022) call this the core problem of Hebrew processing: the input tokens are not the syntactic words, so segmentation and parsing must be done jointly or with a lattice (Goldberg and Tsarfaty 2008; More et al. 2019).

4.3 The vowel of ו 'and'

The conjunction ו is normally ve-. Normative rules, still followed in careful reading and the media but only partly in speech, change it:

In everyday speech ve- is used almost everywhere, and u- survives mostly before b-, m-, p- and in set phrases (u-ma itkha?). The written form is always ו; pointing alone shows the vowel.

4.4 The vowel of ש, ב, כ, ל, מ

• ש is always she- (she-ani, she-ha-).
• ב, כ, ל are be-, ke-, le- before most words; bi-, ki-, li- before a consonant with shva (bi-tmuna 'in a picture', li-yladim > speech le-yeladim); before a guttural with a khataf vowel they copy that vowel, so that indefinite בעבודה is normatively ba-avoda 'in work' (בַּעֲבוֹדָה), sounding like the definite; and fused with the article as ba-, ka-, la- (§4.5).
• מ is mi- before most consonants, with the next consonant doubled in pointing (mi-bayit מִבַּיִת), and me- before gutturals and r (me-ha-, me-ir 'from a city', me-rekhov). In speech mi- and me- vary freely.

4.5 The article swallowed by ב, כ, ל

When ב, כ or ל comes before the article ה, the ה disappears from writing and speech, and its vowel a moves to the preposition:

In pointed text the vowel shows the article (בְּבַיִת / בַּבַּיִת, with the dagesh of the article in the next letter); in unpointed text the two are written exactly the same, and definiteness must be inferred. This hidden article is one of the main sources of ambiguity in Hebrew text processing; UD treebanks handle it by putting Definite=Def|PronType=Art on the preposition word itself rather than inventing an invisible ה token (§9).

מ does not absorb the article: מהבית me-ha-báyit 'from the house', with ה written and pronounced. The prefix ש does not absorb it either: שהבית she-ha-báyit.

In speech the be-/ba- contrast is audible. Where ה is part of a proper name (הפועל ha-po'el, a sports club) it is kept in writing after the prefix: בהפועל be-ha-po'el.

4.6 Prefixes on numbers, Latin script and acronyms

Prefixes attach also to digits, foreign words and abbreviations, often with a hyphen or a geresh-like mark: ב־2026 be-alpáyim ve-esrim ve-shesh, ל־Google, ב-WhatsApp, וצה"ל ve-tsáhal. The Academy's punctuation rules prescribe the maqaf (Hebrew hyphen ־) between a prefix and a digit or foreign-script word (Academy 2017; 2. Script and spelling).

5. Compound and complex prepositions

Many prepositions are built from a simple preposition and a noun (often in the construct), or from two prepositions:

Compound prepositions written as two words (על ידי, על פי, בנוסף ל־) are a problem for tokenization: UD treats many of them as fixed multiword expressions (head word case, the rest fixed), as in the IAHLTknesset card's כפי ש 'as' (כפי + ש fixed). Suffixes go on the last noun: al yadi 'next to me', al yadav 'by him', lefiv 'according to him', betokho 'inside it', bizkhuto 'thanks to him'.

6. Conjunctions

6.1 Coordinating conjunctions

לא הלכתי לעבודה אלא נשארתי בבית.
lo halákhti la-avoda éla nish'árti ba-báyit
NEG go.PST.1SG to.DEF-work but.rather stay.PST.1SG in.DEF-house
'I didn't go to work, but stayed home instead.'

Aval and éla differ like German aber and sondern: éla replaces a negated alternative, aval adds a contrast.

6.2 Subordinating conjunctions

The general subordinator is the prefix ש- she- 'that'; most other subordinators are a preposition or adverb + ש-.

אם תבוא מוקדם, נלך ביחד.
im tavo mukdam, nelekh be-yákhad
if come.FUT.2SG.M early go.FUT.1PL together
'If you come early, we'll go together.'

אמרתי לו שאני לא יכול.
amárti lo she-ani lo yakhol
say.PST.1SG to.3SG.M that-I NEG can.M.SG
'I told him that I can't.'

The relative clause with ש- and its resumptive pronouns (ha-ish she-dibárti ito 'the man I spoke with', lit. 'the man that I spoke with him') is in 7. Syntax.

7. Adverbs and focus particles

Hebrew has a set of short particles that mark focus, scope and the speaker's stance. They are frequent, often unstressed, and hard to translate; a frame reader must at least know their scope and polarity.

7.1 Focus and additive particles

דווקא היום הוא החליט לבוא.
dávka ha-yom hu hekhlít lavo
precisely DEF-day he decide.PST.3SG.M come.INF
'He decided to come today, of all days.'

גם אני לא הבנתי כלום.
gam ani lo hevánti klum
also I NEG understand.PST.1SG nothing
'I didn't understand anything either.'

7.2 Negation words

The full treatment of negation (word order, negative concord, eyn with suffixes) is in 7. Syntax.

7.3 Time, place and manner adverbs

A short list of very common adverbs: akhshav 'now', az 'then, so', etmol 'yesterday', ha-yom 'today', mákhar 'tomorrow', shilshom 'the day before yesterday', mokhrotáyim 'the day after tomorrow', tamid 'always', af pá'am 'never', le-itim 'sometimes', lif'amim 'sometimes', bekarov 'soon', pit'om 'suddenly', kvar 'already', po / kan 'here', sham 'there', hena 'hither', le-mála 'up(stairs)', le-máta 'down', bakhuts 'outside', bifnim 'inside', maher 'fast', le'at 'slowly', be-yákhad 'together', levad 'alone', hárbe 'a lot', ktsat 'a little', me'od 'very', nora 'terribly' (intensifier: nora yafe 'terribly nice'), sababa 'fine, great' (slang).

Many adverbs are prepositional phrases written as one word (bekarov 'soon' = ב + קרוב, be-yákhad 'together', be-emet 'really', be-sédér 'OK'), and UD often splits them into ADP + NOUN even when they are lexicalised; see 11. Modern Hebrew in Universal Dependencies. Manner adverbs are also formed with be-ofen + adjective (be-ofen khofshi 'freely') or be- + abstract noun (bi-mhirut 'quickly', be-zehirut 'carefully').

7.4 Discourse particles (overview)

Spoken Hebrew is full of particles that organise talk and mark attitude. They are only listed here; meanings, functions and examples are in 9. Pragmatics and politeness.

UD tags most of these INTJ or ADV with discourse or advmod; the spoken IAHLTknesset treebank is the place to look for them in annotated form.

8. Prepositions and verbs: governed prepositions

Many verbs take their object with a fixed preposition instead of את. The preposition is part of the lexical entry and does not translate literally. A frame reader must map these to roles:

אני מתגעגע אליך.
ani mitga'agéa elékha
I miss.PRS.M.SG to.2SG.M
'I miss you.'

(mitga'agéa le- + noun, but elékha with a pronoun: with this verb speakers prefer אל in the suffixed forms.)

In UD, the object of such verbs is obl (or obl with a subtype in some treebanks), not obj, because it has a case marker; only את-marked and bare objects are obj. This makes the Hebrew argument structure in UD look very different from the English one, and a role mapper must consult the verb's governed preposition list.

9. How UD tokenizes these words

The details are in 11. Modern Hebrew in Universal Dependencies; here are the facts that bear on this chapter, checked against the IAHLT treebanks of UD 2.18 (CC BY-SA 4.0), on 2026-10-17:

• Prefixes are separate syntactic words inside a multiword token: והבית → ו (CCONJ, cc) + ה (DET, det) + בית.
• The hidden article after ב, כ, ל is not restored as a token; the preposition carries Definite=Def|PronType=Art. The IAHLTknesset example in the treebank card shows this: בעולם ba-olam 'in the world' is ב (ADP, Definite=Def|PronType=Art) + עולם. With מ, the article is a real token: מהבית → מ + ה + בית.
• Inflected prepositions are split into ADP + PRON, with the surface pieces as FORM and the lemmas restored: לי → ל + י (lemma אני), שלו → של + ו (lemma הוא; relation nmod:poss), אותו → אות + ו (lemma את + הוא; relation obj), עליו → עלי + ו, ממנו → ממנ + ו, ביניהם → ביני + הם. The pronoun gets the relation (obl, obj, nmod:poss) and the preposition is case on it.
• כש- is one SCONJ (kshe-), not כ + ש.
• אותו 'the same' is a DET, not a split ADP + PRON.
• Compound prepositions are usually head + fixed: כפי ש-, על ידי, בגלל ש- vary by treebank.

Counts in the IAHLT data (train+dev+test, both treebanks together): בו split as ב + ו 127 times, לי as ל + י 113, אותו as אות + ו 109, שלו as של + ו 85, אותם as אות + ם 76, עליו as עלי + ו 36, ממנו as ממנ + ו 16.

10. Summary for a parser

References

• Academy of the Hebrew Language. 2017. כללי הכתיב חסר הניקוד (Rules for unpointed spelling) and punctuation rules. hebrew-academy.org.il/topic/hahlatot/missingvocalizationspelling
• Glinert, Lewis. 2017. Modern Hebrew: An Essential Grammar. 4th ed. Routledge. (Not held; cited for inflected prepositions, the prefix order and the vowel of ו.)
• Goldberg, Yoav and Reut Tsarfaty. 2008. "A Single Generative Model for Joint Morphological Segmentation and Syntactic Parsing." ACL 2008. local: $RESEARCH_RAW/aclbulk-2008-goldberg-single-generative-model-joint-morphological/.
• Hacohen, Aviya, Olga Kagan and Dana Plaut. 2021. "Differential Object Marking in Modern Hebrew: Definiteness and Partitivity." Glossa 6(1): 148. doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5729 our card — local: $RESEARCH_RAW/lingbulk-2021-hacohen-differential-object-marking-modern-hebrew/.
• More, Amir, Amit Seker, Victoria Basmova and Reut Tsarfaty. 2019. "Joint Transition-Based Models for Morpho-Syntactic Parsing: Parsing Strategies for MRLs and a Case Study from Modern Hebrew." TACL 7. aclanthology.org/Q19-1003 our card (not held locally).
• Seker, Amit et al. 2022. "AlephBERT: Language Model Pre-training and Evaluation from Sub-Word to Sentence Level." ACL 2022. aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.4 our card — local: $RESEARCH_RAW/acl-2022-seker-alephbert-language-model-pre-training/.
• Tsarfaty, Reut. 2006. "Integrated Morphological and Syntactic Disambiguation for Modern Hebrew." COLING/ACL 2006 Student Research Workshop. local: $RESEARCH_RAW/aclbulk-2006-tsarfaty-integrated-morphological-syntactic-disambiguation-modern/.
• Tsarfaty, Reut, Amit Seker, Shoval Sadde and Stav Klein. 2019. "What's Wrong with Hebrew NLP? And How to Make it Right." EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019 demos. aclanthology.org/D19-3044 our card — local: $RESEARCH_RAW/aclbulk-2019-tsarfaty-what-s-wrong-hebrew-nlp/.
• Universal Dependencies 2.18: UD_Hebrew-IAHLTwiki and UD_Hebrew-IAHLTknesset (CC BY-SA 4.0). universaldependencies.org/treebanks/he iahltknesset — local: $RESEARCH_RAW/lexres/treebanks/ud-2.18/. Segmentations and counts in §2.2 and §9 were read from the .conllu files on 2026-10-17.
• Universal Dependencies, Hebrew guidelines (_he/feat/Prefix.md, _he/dep/case-acc.md, _he/dep/case-gen.md). universaldependencies.org/he — local: $RESEARCH_RAW/hebgram/sa/ud-docs-he-hbo/_he/.
• Wikipedia contributors. "Modern Hebrew grammar," sections on prepositions and prefixes. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern Hebrew grammar (consulted 2026-10-17; CC BY-SA; paraphrased).
• Wiktionary (via kaikki.org). English Wiktionary Hebrew entries with inflection tables (checked: בין). local: $RESEARCH_RAW/hebgram/sa/kaikki-enwiktionary-hebrew-aramaic/kaikki.org-dictionary-Hebrew.jsonl (CC BY-SA).

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