Theticity and subject inversion: a misconception? What can we learn from colloquial Israeli Hebrew?

Thetic constructions are generally perceived as presenting a split between semantic and syntactic predication. Studies in theticity maintain that inverse order of subject and predicate is a prominent criterion for the identification of thetic sentences, with an added factor being the lack of agreement between the constituent perceived as subject and the constituent perceived as predicate. Another criterion for identifying a sentence as thetic is the so-called sentence focus as opposed to focus of a single sentence constituent. The purpose of this article is to present a syntactic analysis of thetic sentences that have been commonly analyzed as verb-initial ones or, in short, VS constructions, as manifested in Colloquial Israeli Hebrew. The analysis offered here is based on previous research on IH sentence structure, which demonstrated that many sentences in IH are unipartite, containing only a predicate domain. The syntactic approach underlying this analysis is functional, communicative, discourse-based, and grounded in information structure. For the study of spoken language, an analysis of segmental elements must be combined with prosodic analysis. The study of thetic constructions presented here draws on research into existential-presentative constructions in colloquial IH, viewing them as unipartite sentences. It will be proposed that what appears to be a VS structure should not be analyzed as a bipartite sentence where a verb (or predicate) is followed by a subject, but rather as a sentence consisting only of a predicate domain, which includes an essential predicative core in second position and an embedded initial component.