The ups and downs of Hebrew verb movement

Abstract

This paper puts forth a hypothesis on the nature of the transition from VSO word order to SVO word order and, more specifically, on the status of grammars which are in a state of transition. I argue that among such grammars one expects to find one in which [SPEC,IP] is never a so-called A-position and in which syntactic verb movement to I is optional and that Modern Hebrew is an example of such a language. The first part of the paper is dedicated to evidence in favor of the optional nature of verb movement, while the second part explores the properties of [SPEC,IP] and the consequences which its non-A-status has for quantification, movement and word order.