On the Diachronic Relevance of the Promotion to Subject Hierarchy

An examination of Colloquial Israeli Hebrew possessives gives credence to E. Keenan's promotion of them to subject hierarchy in diachronic as well as synchronic analysis (See 'Towards a Universal Definition of 'Subject' ' in Li, C. N. (editor) Subject & Topic New York: Academic Press, 1976.). The possessive construction, as found in literary language, is undergoing change in the colloquial language such that the subject term is losing some subject properties. This change can be portrayed in terms of a subject property gradation validated by the manner in which the subject properties are lost. When the possessed nominal is definite, its raisability to subject position is tenuous, suggesting a correlation between the manner in which both subject behavior & subject coding properties are lost. This process seems to be taking place to avoid intolerable ambiguity due to the partial identity of 'have' & 'be' in Hebrew. T. Lamb