Hebrew Verbal Multi-Word Expressions

Livnat Herzig Sheinfux, Tali Arad Gershler, Nurit Melnik & Shuly Wintner

Multi-word expressions (MWEs) in Modern Hebrew (MH), as in other languages, are not simple to characterize, since they vary in the degree of idiosyncrasy with respect to their semantic, syntactic, and morphological behavior. MWEs in MH are found in various syntactic constructions. In this talk we focus on verbal MWEs: we consider different types of this class of MWEs, and propose an analysis in the framework of HPSG. Moreover, we incorporate this analysis in HeGram, a deep linguistic processing grammar of Modern Hebrew. Our motivation is twofold. First, the need to incorporate MWEs into the grammar is unquestionable, especially in light of estimates claiming that MWEs account for approximately half of the entries in the lexicon. Second, we view MWEs as a challenging test case for the innovative architecture implemented in HeGram.