From addition to concession: Hebrew "gam" 'also'

Abstract

This article investigates the internal structure of the Hebrew particle gam (“also”) from the perspective of construction grammar. Hebrew gam seems to exhibit meanings of both addition and concession, as a single particle and through compounds such as ma gam (“all the more so”), gam kaxa (“as it is”) and gam im (“even”). The findings reveal that the interpretation of the various meanings realized by the construction result from the interaction of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors which in turn lead to a form-meaning pairing associated with conventional meanings. The article argues that gam functions as a partly– schematic construction which displays non-discrete meanings ranging from addition at one end of a continuum through polysemous cases which display both addition and concession to concession at the other end of the continuum.