Definiteness in the Hebrew noun phrase

This paper suggests an analysis of Modern Hebrew noun phrases in the framew ork of HPSG. It focuses on the peculiar properties of the definite article, including the requirement for definiteness agreement among various element s in the noun phrase, definiteness inheritance in construct-state nominals, the fact that the article does not combine with constructs and the similar ities between construct-state nouns and adjectives. Central to our analysis is the assumption that the Hebrew definite article is an affix, rather tha n a clitic or a stand-alone word. Several arguments, from all levels of lin guistic representation, are provided to justify this claim. Adopting the le xical hypothesis, we conclude that the article combines with nominals in th e lexicon, and is no longer available for syntactic processes. This leads t o an analysis of noun phrases as NPs, rather than as DPs; we show that such a view is compatible with accepted criteria for headedness. We provide an HPSG analysis that covers the above mentioned phenomena, correctly predicti ng the location of the definite article in constructs, accounting for defin iteness agreement and definiteness inheritance constraints, and yielding si milar structures for the two major ways of expressing genitive relations in Hebrew.