The Biblical Hebrew infinitive

The paper proposes that the same functional categories which determine the inflection
of the Biblical Hebrew finite verb also determine the feature specification of the Biblical
Hebrew infinitive. This proposal depends both on demonstrating that the infinitive
is a verb, rather than a noun (or a verbal noun), as traditionally assumed, and
on showing that the functional categories that embed the infinitive are clausal rather
than nominal. The article starts by examining the traditional distinction between the
Infinitive Absolute and Infinitive Construct, and makes an argument for a single infinitive,
with two allomorphs. The former is a verb marked as [+Mood], while the latter
is marked as [–Mood], and both are also specified for two other clausal functional
categories: T and Asp/Mod. These two latter categories determine a 4-way classification
of finite/infinitival verbs: [+T+Asp/Mod], [+T–Asp/Mod], [–T+Asp/Mod], [–T–
Asp/Mod]. This classification determines a concomitant 4-way alternation of attachment
options of subject and/or object clitics to the verb: [+subj.cl.+Obj.cl.], [+subj.cl.–
Obj.cl.], [–subj.cl.+Obj.cl.], [–subj.cl.–Obj.cl.], and moreover accounts for the distribution
of the different verb forms.