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On the grammaticization of ke′ilu ‘like’, lit. ‘as if’, in Hebrew talk-in-interaction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2002

YAEL MASCHLER
Affiliation:
Department of Communication and, Department of Hebrew Language, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa, 31905, Israel, maschler@research.haifa.ac.il

Abstract

This study investigates the employment in modern Hebrew of an element having a lexical source involving comparison (k(e)-, ‘like’) that has proliferated over the past decade or so in Israel; ke′ilu ‘like’, lit. ‘as if’. The data come from audio recordings of casual conversations of college-educated Israelis with their friends and relatives, totaling approximately 78 minutes of talk among 72 speakers, transcribed in full and segmented into intonation units. A qualitative analysis of talk-in-interaction reveals four nonliteral functions of this expression: hedging, self-rephrasal, focus-marking, and quotation. A quantitative perspective on the distribution of these functions is presented, and these qualitative and quantitative analyses lead to an examination of the functional itinerary of this word in Hebrew discourse. A comparison with two “equivalents” of ke′ilu, English like and French genre leads to a discussion of functional parallelism across languages and yields further support for Hopper's principle of “persistence” in grammaticization. (Hebrew talk-in-interaction, grammaticization, cross-language pragmatics, discourse particles, hedging, self-rephrasal, focus-marking, quotatives.)* In memory of Suzanne Fleischman

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2002 Cambridge University Press

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