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Subject to change: Agreement and case

What it is about

In colloquial Hebrew, an unaccusative verb with a postverbal subject may show default 3rd-person masculine singular agreement, even when the subject is feminine or plural. The same agreement is impossible when the subject precedes the verb. Preminger (2009; 2014) had linked such lack of agreement to intervention, and the authors test this with two acceptability judgement experiments, with intervening possessive datives and adverbs and with singular and plural conditions. Intervention improves only the singular-plural condition, so it is not what licenses the lack of agreement; the authors conclude the phenomenon does not support Preminger's approach. They propose that a postverbal subject, in a language that does not morphologically mark nominative, can be reanalysed as caseless, and so is invisible to the agreement probe. They note that Hebrew existential and possessive constructions went through a similar change in the early twentieth century.

Ideas

For Mova

I1 and I2 go into 7. Syntax and into the UD annotation notes of 11. Modern Hebrew in Universal Dependencies. I3 is a test set for the rule, and a corpus check on treebanks/he/.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.23869

@article{rimon2026subject,
  title = {{Subject to change: Agreement and case}},
  author = {Rimon, Nofar and Siloni, Tal},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.23869},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.23869}
}

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