Degrammaticalization: The Linguistic Change of the Definite Article in Modern Hebrew / מצורן נטייה לרכיב תחבירי: השינוי הלשוני של תווית היידוע בעברית בת ימינו

Throughout the history of Hebrew, the definite article ha- has functioned as a nominal inflectional affix, marking the emphatic state of the noun as opposed to the absolute and the construct states. It follows then that ha- is incompatible with the construct state. In Modern Hebrew, however, ha- does attach to construct-state nominals, as many researchers have noted from the 1930s onward. In this paper we argue that this is part of a larger change in the morpho-syntactic distribution of the definite article: ha- is currently undergoing a change from inflectional prefix to proclitic. This shift from a more grammatical to a more independent entity involves less selectivity for the host, attachment to phrases rather than lexical items, and sometimes even lack of participation in agreement processes. Such change contrasts with the regular direction of change in grammaticalization clines, from less to more grammatical. We maintain that the change witnessed in the distribution of ha- is an instance of the much rarer process of degrammaticalization.