The Hebrew Discourse Marker KEILU Used by Native Russian Speakers in Israel

• In Event: Linguistic Interpretations

Abstract

The study examines how Hebrew discourse markers are employed by immigrants from the former Soviet Union and explores the influence of Russian discourse markers on the Hebrew ones.
Little is known about this subject due to a lack of database of colloquial Hebrew speech of this target social group.
In my talk, I will discuss the usage characteristics of the Hebrew discourse marker keilu by immigrants from the Former Soviet Union, based on a corpus of recorded conversations. The corpus is based of more than 17 hours of recorded interpersonal conversations. Data was collected from 50 18-70 year-old individuals, which have done an ‘aliyah’ when they were 12 years old and above, and who live in Israel at least 10 years. 401 occurrences of keilu were located in the corpus.
Several functions that had not been discussed in earlier studies on keilu in the colloquial speech of native Hebrew speakers were found. To better understand the nature of mismatches between this social group’s usage and the native’s one, functions of keilu were compared to those of the roughly equivalent Russian discourse marker типа. I will demonstrate the influence of типа on the emergence of new functions of keilu, as well as new pragmatic features of functions which have been already discussed in the literature.

Author

• Einat Trakhtman, Bar-Ilan University - BIU