Prepositions and the Grammaticalization of Ancient Hebrew Bipartite Reciprocal Markers

Abstract

Abstract Besides using the verbal niphal and hitpael stems, ancient Hebrew can indicate semantic reciprocity with bipartite reciprocal markers such as , literally ‘someone with his brother’. In contrast to the Western European counter-parts of these constructions (e.g. English each other), the ancient Hebrew variants are not fully grammaticalized into a single morphological unit like . This article considers one type of bipartite reciprocal marker (the one using ‘someone’ and a term denoting kinship or fellowship) in detail, to see whether the preposition in the construction (e.g., ‘with’) may have prevented further grammaticalization. Since no bleaching of the preposition can be observed in the corpus of Biblical and Qumran Hebrew, we conclude that prepositions continued to have a significant semantic value, which indeed suggests that their near-obligatory presence has prevented further grammaticalization.