Spoken Narrative and Preferred Clause Structure : Evidence from Modern Hebrew Discourse
This study examines the spontaneous oral narrative of three native speakers of Hebrew for overall clause structure in terms of number and type of arguments per clause, following DuBois' (1985) theory of Preferred Argument Structure. The results indicate that there exists a preferred
shape for narrative clauses in Hebrew and that it strongly parallels that which has been found in the ergative Mayan language, Sacapultec, upon which Du Bois' study is based. As Hebrew is a nominative-accusative language, the results point to the universality of pragmatic-cognitive factors
and information flow in discourse.
Document Type: Research Article
Publication date: 01 January 1996
- International Journal sponsored by the Foundation "Foundations of Language"
- Access Key
- Free content
- Partial Free content
- New content
- Open access content
- Partial Open access content
- Subscribed content
- Partial Subscribed content
- Free trial content