doi 10.1075/slsi.27 .07mas © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company Word order in time Emergent Hebrew (N s )V/VN s syntax Yael Maschler his study explores the temporal dynamics of subject-predicate word order in the verbal clauses of spoken narrative Hebrew discourse. Contrary to previ- ous claims (Glinert 1989), word order is shown to be rather ixed, with only 57 tokens of the VN s construction in a 6.5 hour corpus. hey are employed to introduce a protagonist/referent, to index a major shit in narrative low, or to end a complication episode/narrative (Labov 1972) by resolving it and/or formulating its climax. Prosodic patterns are shown to strongly correlate with syntactic patterns. Constraints of temporal dynamics at clause-level syntax (syn- tactic projections, Auer 2005) along with the motivation to enhance audience involvement (Tannen 1989), result in the emergence of Hebrew as an (N s )V/ VN s Alternating language (Hopper 1987b). 1. Introduction Research in Emergent grammar (Hopper 1987a, 1988, 1992, 2011) and online syntax (Auer 2009) has taught us the far-reaching repercussions of the fact that syntactic structures are organized in time. his study sets out to explore the tem- poral dynamics of a classic typological syntactic matter – subject-predicate word order – in the verbal clauses of spoken narrative Hebrew discourse. 1 1. I greatfully acknowledge the invitation to participate in the Temporality in Interaction panel organized by Arnulf Deppermann and Susanne Günthner at the Twelth Meeting of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) in Manchester, July 2011. he present study has beneitted greatly from many discussions I have had about subject-predicate word order with Peter Auer. I acknowledge also his invitation to the FRIAS symposium on Let/Right- Asymmetries in Conversational Language in Freiburg during May 2012, in which I continued to develop these ideas. I also wish to thank the reviewers of this chapter, Arnulf Deppermann, Susanne Günthner, Paul Hopper, and Sandra hompson for their insightful comments on earlier drats.