The Biblical Hebrew infinitive

Abstract

Abstract The paper proposes that the same functional categories which determine the inflection of the Biblical Hebrew finite verb also determine the feature specification of the Biblical Hebrew infinitive. This proposal depends both on demonstrating that the infinitive is a verb, rather than a noun (or a verbal noun), as traditionally assumed, and on showing that the functional categories that embed the infinitive are clausal rather than nominal. The article starts by examining the traditional distinction between the Infinitive Absolute and Infinitive Construct, and makes an argument for a single infinitive, with two allomorphs. The former is a verb marked as [+Mood], while the latter is marked as [–Mood], and both are also specified for two other clausal functional categories: T and Asp/Mod. These two latter categories determine a 4-way classification of finite/infinitival verbs: [+T+Asp/Mod], [+T–Asp/Mod], [–T+Asp/Mod], [–T–Asp/Mod]. This classification determines a concomitant 4-way alternation of attachment options of subject and/or object clitics to the verb: [+subj.cl.+Obj.cl.], [+subj.cl.–Obj.cl.], [–subj.cl.+Obj.cl.], [–subj.cl.–Obj.cl.], and moreover accounts for the distribution of the different verb forms.