Hagit Borer
12 May 2025, 16:30, SR1

The paradox of phrasal prepositions in Modern Hebrew
(joint work with Noam Faust)

Phrasal prepositions in Modern Hebrew with the sequence P+N(+Complement) comprise not only the frequently discussed locatives (the equivalents of English ‘in front (of)’) but hundreds of other possible combinations, with rich potential ‘lexical’ meaning (Content). When it comes to their grammatical properties, we find that phonological, prosodic, Content, and syntactic properties do not align. While the complex preposition itself (P+N) is a phonological unit and a Content unit, syntactically and prosodically, the structure is P+[N + Complement]. Utilizing a Span-based approach to both phonological realization and Content matching, we suggest that mismatches are inherent to the grammatical representation, and more specifically, that neither phonological representations nor Content are exclusively the properties of terminals or constituents, but are nonetheless constrained by well-defined locality conditions. Among other consequences, the mismatches under consideration will attest to the fact that attempts to define a unified domain for phonological realization and for Content, either lexically or syntactically, are fundamentally on the wrong track, a conclusion also independently reached (at the very least) by Borer (2019), Preminger (2021), and Adger (2024).