The Hebrew Object Marker and Semantic Type Gabi Danon Tel-Aviv University Abstract It is well-known that the object marker in Hebrew, et, is used only in front of definite objects. In this paper I show that even though the distribu- tion of et is governed by a formal notion of definiteness which is determined by syntactic factors, et itself is not semantically vacuous. I discuss the phe- nomenon of ”definiteness spreading” in construct state nominals and show that this is not spreading of semantic definiteness. Use of et in front of a CSN, however, blocks an indefinite reading which would have been avail- able otherwise. Other semantic effects of et involve distributive readings of conjunctions and the interpretation of wh- words and pseudoclefts. I pro- pose that all these semantic effects can be derived from the assumption that et acts as a type shifting operator. 1 Introduction The object marker in Hebrew, et, is used only with definite objects 1 : (1) a. Dan Dan kara read et et ha- the- sefer. book ’Dan read the book.’ b. Dan Dan kara read sefer. book ’Dan read a book.’ As shown in detail in Danon (2001), the relevant notion of ’definiteness’ in this respect is not the usual semantic notion. This can be seen very clearly with demonstratives. The demonstrative ’article’ in Hebrew, ze, is syntactically an 1 I use the term ’object marker’ rather than ’accusative marker’, leaving open the question whether et is really related to accusative Case. See Danon (2001) for a discussion of the Case- related properties of et. 1