31 Journal of Semitic Studies LXX/1 Spring 2025 doi: 10.1093/jss/fgae044 © The author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of Manchester. All rights reserved. IMPERSONAL EXPERIENTIAL CONSTRUCTIONS IN ANCIENT NORTHWEST SEMITIC LANGUAGES IN A DIACHRONIC PERSPECTIVE TANIA NOTARIUS UNIVERSITY OF THE FREE STATE, SOUTH AFRICA Abstract This paper scrutinizes the impersonal usage of experiential constructions in ancient Northwest Semitic (NWS) languages. A methodological dis- tinction is made between affective and evaluative types of the impersonal experiential usage, where the affective type communicates the physical and emotive condition of the Experiencer (Hebrew ḥam lô ‘he feels warm’), and the evaluative type communicates an attitude towards par- ticular proposition (Hebrew ˀim ˁal PN ṭôḇ ‘if PN would like …’). These types are distributed differently in the ancient NWS languages. The Old Canaanite of El-Amarna demonstrates both usages of the impersonal experiential construction, while Akkadian has only the evaluative usage. Ugaritic avoids the impersonal usage, except for some diagnostic cases in the language of prose. Biblical Hebrew consistently demonstrates both types. Official Aramaic exemplifies the evaluative type only, while the affective type emerges at the Middle and Late Aramaic stages. In this paper, it is hypothesized that the impersonal experiential construction, and its affective type in particular, may be an areal Canaanite feature. The affective experiential usage appears in Ugaritic and then a thousand years later in Aramaic, as a result of contact with Canaanite languages. 1. Introduction: impersonal experiential constructions between the affective and evaluative semantics* 1.1 Impersonal experiential construction: syntactic discussion The impersonal construction is a sub-type of experiential construction. 1 Experiential constructions are defined in this paper as a stative (verbal * The author thanks Bert Kouwenberg, Steve Hewitt, and the anonymous reviewers for the comments on the paper’s draft. This work is based on research supported in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Tania Notarius UID 150167). The preliminary version of this research was presented at the Arbeitsgruppe fuer Semitistiks Workshop of DMG, at the Leipzig University; the author thanks the participants for their fruitful comments. The grantholder acknowledges that opinions, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jss/article/70/1/31/7960076 by Hebrew University of Jerusalem user on 06 February 2025