Definiteness in the Hebrew Noun Phrase
			    Shuly Wintner
		   Seminar fuer Sprachwissenschaft
			Universitaet Tuebingen
			 Kl. Wilhelmstr. 113
		       72074 Tuebingen, Germany
		   shuly@sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de
 

This paper suggests an analysis of Modern Hebrew noun phrases in the
framework of HPSG. It focuses on the peculiar properties of the
definite article, including the requirement for definiteness agreement
among various elements in the noun phrase, definiteness inheritance in
construct-state nominals, the fact that the article does not combine
with constructs and the similarities between construct-state nouns and
adjectives. Central to our analysis is the assumption that the Hebrew
definite article is an affix, rather than a clitic or a stand-alone
word. Several arguments, from all levels of linguistic representation,
are provided to justify this claim. Adopting the lexical hypothesis,
we conclude that the article combines with nominals in the lexicon,
and is no longer available for syntactic processes. This leads to an
analysis of noun phrases as NPs, rather than as DPs; we show that such
a view is compatible with accepted criteria for headedness. We provide
an HPSG analysis that covers the above mentioned phenomena, correctly
predicting the location of the definite article in constructs,
accounting for definiteness agreement and definiteness inheritance
constraints and yielding similar structures for the two major ways of
expressing genitive relations in Hebrew.