The role of prosody in the grammaticization of Hebrew naxon (‘right/true’): Synchronic and diachronic aspects

• The functions of naxon in appeal and non-appeal intonation contours are identified.
• A synchronic analysis in a spoken corpus outlines two functional itineraries.
• Diachronic evidence is added as further support for these grammaticization paths.
• Counter-evidence for asymmetric hypothesis on left/right peripheries is provided.
• Study sheds new light on xagam debate in Hebrew linguistics and on role of prosody.

Based on a synchronic analysis of all naxon (‘right/true’) tokens found throughout a corpus of casual spoken Hebrew discourse, we outline two continua of synchronic usage suggesting two functional itineraries for naxon. We show that naxon employed in non-appeal (Du Bois et al., 1992) intonation contours first evolved from a verb to an adjective and then to a prototypical discourse marker employed to agree with or confirm an interlocutor's utterance while expressing epistemic stance of certainty. Taking another grammaticization (Hopper, 1987) path, independent of the former one, naxon employed in appeal intonation contours evolved beyond the adjective into the widely-debated xagam (‘lacking person, gender, and number’, Rosén, 1963) fossilized impersonal form. It then continued to evolve into a ‘quasi-xagam’ form constituting a projecting ( Auer, 2005) construction, the function of which is to foreshadow an assertion requiring agreement/confirmation. Diachronic evidence from Biblical, Mishnaic, Medieval, and early Modern Hebrew is then added as further support for these grammaticization paths. The two different paths underscore the importance of considering prosody in determining the functional itinerary of a linguistic form. We provide counter-evidence from a Semitic language for the asymmetric hypothesis concerning the left and right peripheries ( Degand and Fagard, 2011 and Beeching and Detges, 2014). Finally, we contribute a discourse-functional perspective on the xagam debate, showing the mechanisms by which a particular syntactic category may have come about and how it continues to evolve in the language.