Subject: summary : expletive negation in modern hebrew

on february 27 , i posted a querry on expletive negation in modern hebrew . i want to thank ariel cohen ( ariel _ cohen @ riga . mt . cs . cmu . edu ) , michael ephratt ( rhlh702 @ uvm . haifa . ac . il ) , bob fradkin ( raf100f @ oduvm . cc . odu . edu ) , laurence horn ( lhorn @ yalevm . cis . yale . edu ) , paul rowlett ( p . a . rowlett @ mod - lang . salford . ac . uk ) and lucia tovena ( tovena @ latl . unige . ch ) for their comments . my querry originated from michael moore 's comment to the effect that in modern hebrew , the sentence negation of subordinate clauses dominated by before , until and i ' m afraid can be interpreted referentially or expletively . according to ariel cohen , only until contexts allow an expletive negation . bob fradkin mentionned that expletive negation in mh seemed less frequent than in french . while it seems that expletive negation in mh has a narrower domain of use than in french , there might also be a question of style involved here ; while expletive negation is an aknowledged grammatical feature of formal style in french , it might be a non-standard feature of mh . this is suggested to me by the fact that neither glinert 1989 suggested by michael ephratt nor rosen 1977 even mention expletive negation in mh . lucia tovena pointed me to her 1994 paper in geneva generative papers about italian , hungarian and hindi expletive negation in until contexts . for a typological overview of expletive negation , one can consult horn 1978 , which shows the typological extension of the phenomenon . now , i ' m still left with a few unanswered questions . i ' m surprised that there apparently does n't exist any study on the topic in mh . i wonder whether i should be looking in the direction of ancient hebrew . a question of more general interest is how to deal with divergent distributions of a phenomenon across languages ; in other words , how should the fact that expletive negation exists in comparative and fearing contexts in a large number of languages but not in mh ? ? could matters of style , as suggested above , explain this ? ? thanks for those who responded and for those who will . - glinert , l . , 1989 , the grammar of modern hebrew , cambridge up . - horn , l . , 1978 , some aspects of negation , j . greenberg , universals of human language , vol . 4 , standford up , 127-210 . - moore , m . , 1992 , double negation , et cetera , 304-309 . - rosen , 1977 , contemporary hebrew . pierre larrivee departement de langues et linguistique , universite laval , quebec , canada , g1k 7p4 3914larp @ vm1 . ulaval . ca
