How to tell the time in Hebrew

Benny Shanon*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

A corpus of expressions specifying time, length, and price in modern Hebrew was collected. The corpus reveals systematic morphological patterns that are at the same time complex and consistent both within and across informants. Further check revealed that informants are totally unaware of the rules governing these patterns. Indeed, these rules are not specified in the literature (grammar books, instruction texts, or language manuals) either. The systematic patterns of verbal behavior coupled with informants' total ignorance of the rules governing them are taken as an empirical demonstration of the contrast between "knowing how" and "knowing that." The contrast is significant in that it pertains not to abstract formal rules (like the syntactic rules with which the contrast is standardly associated) but rather to concrete rules of morphology.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)317-329
Number of pages13
JournalJournal of Psycholinguistic Research
Volume14
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - May 1985

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