📄 Extraposition in Modern Hebrew

Summary

The paper describes extraposition in contemporary spoken and written Hebrew. In this construction, a sentence element is pulled out and set apart as a separate "subject", usually at the front (topicalization) but sometimes at the end as an afterthought. Bar contends that this produces a complex sentence whose underlying structure is essentially nominal. The isolated element is the subject, and the adjacent clause is a predicate that is not subordinate to it.

Her corpus is a hand-collected set of examples from Hebrew books, newspapers and overheard conversation. From it she draws two defining conditions:

• Isolation of the element is obligatory.
• Reference back to it from the predicate clause is also required, but that reference need not be an overt resumptive pronoun.

The paper then covers:

• implicit resumption,
• incompletely transformed cases that keep a preposition,
• rear extraposition, which is anticipated by a demonstrative or personal pronoun,
• extraposition of the verb's lexical content through an infinitive.

The work matters because it separates genuine extraposition from mere fronting. It also shows how the link between the detached element and the clause can survive without explicit morphology.

Key points

• The article is an English version of the author's Hebrew paper in Lesonenu 60 (1997). Its numbered examples come from contemporary books, newspapers and conversations.
• The paper treats extraposition as a special case of topicalization. It surveys the competing terms: Casus Pendens (Driver), extraposition (Jespersen), and left/right dislocation (generative tradition).
• Dropped resumptives:
  • A missing resumptive direct object is common, mirroring object drop in Hebrew relative clauses.
  • A missing indirect object, where the preposition disappears, was found only twice and only in low colloquial speech.
• Pronoun choice in rear extraposition:
  • The clause anticipates the afterthought with a demonstrative such as ze ("it/this").
  • When the referent is a person, a personal pronoun is used instead.
  • The afterthought can be a noun phrase, a clause, or an infinitive (e.g. "it is frustrating to see…").
• Verb extraposition: a fronted infinitive is picked up either by an inflected verb of the same root ("to steal, I don't steal") or by the demonstrative ze. With rear placement, only the demonstrative is possible.

Interesting ideas

• I1. Defining a construction by two tests (structural isolation plus reference back from the clause) rather than by the presence of a pronoun lets implicit links still count as the construction. — For Mova (tree): Detect English left dislocations ("The police, they…") with this two-condition check and attach the fronted phrase with the UD dislocated relation even when no overt pronoun resumes it.
• I2. A rear afterthought exists to give lexical content to a vague anticipatory "it/this", so the pronoun should be resolved forward to the trailing phrase rather than backward. — For Mova (frames): Coreference should link cataphoric "it" in "it is true, what they say" or "it is frustrating to see them" to the trailing clause, so the frame gets a real argument.
• I3. Pronoun type signals referent type: a demonstrative anticipates a general matter or proposition, while a personal pronoun anticipates a specific person. — For Mova (world): When building entities, treat "this/it" anticipating an afterthought as a proposition or event node, and "she/he" as a person entity, which avoids spurious entities.
• I4. A fronted element that still carries its preposition is analysed as a half-finished transformation, a useful category for messy spoken input. — For Mova (tree): Add a repair rule for fronted prepositional phrases resumed in the clause ("About the menu, I prepared it"), so the parser does not force them into an ordinary oblique attachment.
• I5. Fronted infinitives echoed by a same-root verb ("To eat, I ate grass") act as contrastive topics rather than real arguments. — For Mova (frames): Recognise a fronted verb echoed by the same verb as a contrastive topic marker, so it is not counted as a second event.