Thursday Interdisciplinary Colloquium

Generative works over the last few decades have focused mostly on deriving the word order and hierarchical relations of these three genitives, as well as on deriving their possible interpretations. However, very often, these analyses seem to overgenerate, such that speaker judgment on genitive acceptability is frequently lower than what would be predicted on the basis of those analyses. In this talk I argue that the alternation between these three genitive types is subject to multiple independent constraints that cannot be reduced to a single, unified factor. I discuss evidence for weak (soft, violable) constraints from semantics, morphology, and processing, as well as lexical idiosyncrasies that must all be taken into consideration in order to properly characterize the full range of grammaticality observed in this domain. I then discuss some implications of these facts for a theory of Hebrew genitives.