That’s what I need: A multimodal study of Hebrew ‘Reversed Pseudo-Clefts’

Employing Interactional Linguistic methodology and multimodal interactional analysis, we investigate the Hebrew [ze ma she- ‘this is what’ + clause] structure, known as a ‘reversed pseudo-cleft’. The corpus consists of 9 hours of video-recorded casual conversation among friends and relatives, manifesting 70 [ze ma she- + clause] tokens. Instead of the traditional grammatical analysis of this structure as consisting of a nominalized clause functioning as predicate, embedded within a matrix clause, we argue for an analysis of ze ma she- as a ‘fixed chunk’, a construction which has grammaticized from repetitive discourse actions to serve particular functions in interaction. Furthermore, we argue that there is no justification for viewing this structure as a ‘reversed’ form of a Hebrew pseudo-cleft. We support our claims with evidence from prosodic, lexico-semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and embodied patterning of the [ze ma she-+ clause] tokens found in our corpus. We show that the structure functions in 71% of the instances for (1) framing prior talk metalingually or (2) claim-backing. Other, less frequent uses include (3) seeking clarification, (4) postulating some general truth, (5) disclaiming responsibility, and (6) getting back to a previous topic. Only two tokens throughout our data display (7) the summative function, claimed as by far the most common function for English reversed pseudo-clefts. Our study supports a view of grammar as a temporally-unfolding, tightly interwoven with embodied conduct, ever-evolving resource for carrying out social actions in the dialogical process of interaction.