Love through Death in Modern Hebrew: A Syntactic Treatment

Investigating the verb la-mut ‘to die’ in Hebrew, one observes that, depending on the context, it has a secondary meaning ranging from ‘want’ to ‘ love’. It will be argued here that the different readings of the verb stem from a regularity in Hebrew according to which some verbs may change their interpretation in a predictable way, depending on their syntactic environment; when followed by a NP, the verb is interpreted as a comment on a situation; where followed by S, no such comment is required. The syntactic arguments for the analysis are based upon the operation of the Noun Phrase Constraint. The semantic arguments assume that a sentence embedded in a NP is a presupposition of the entire sentence. This analysis suggests that some verbs of perception and the like have as one of their semantic features [+/-comment] and some may add such a feature through the process of the semantic reading of the entire utterance .