Syntactic definiteness in the grammar of Modern Hebrew

Definiteness has often been assumed to play a role in syntax, most notably in relation to various "definiteness effects" and case alternations (Bellet ti 1988; De Hoop 1992; and many others). The question whether this involves a semantic property that is relevant in syntax, or an independent syntacti c representation of definiteness, remains to a large extent unanswered This paper shows that, on the one hand, Hebrew provides independent evidence fo r assuming a definiteness feature in syntax; and on the other hand, this fo rmal definiteness does not simply correlate with semantic definiteness, and there is no simple one-to-one mapping between the two kinds of definitenes s. The second part of this paper focuses on the Hebrew object marker et, wh ich appears only in front of DPs having the syntactic definiteness feature. I argue that et fulfills a requirement for structural case that Hebrew ver bs cannot assign, and that this requirement is related to the representatio n of definiteness as a formal feature and not to any semantic property. In this light I consider Belletti's (1988) theory of abstract partitive and sh ow that Hebrew object marking seems to provide evidence against it.