Bracha Nir
Biographic Data
| ID | 659437 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bracha Nir |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bracha |
| FAMILY NAME | Nir |
| SIGNATURE | NIR B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Haifa |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8358-5483 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 11 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 22 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Effects of Systematicity on Word Learning in Preschool Children
This study investigated the role of systematicity in word learning, focusing on Semitic morpho-phonology where words exhibit multiple levels of systematicity. Building upon previous research on phonological templates, we explored how systematicity based on such templates, whether they encode meanings or not, influenced word learning in preschool-age Hebrew-speaking children. We examined form–meaning systematicity, where words share phonological t…
In their own words
Little is known about pre-school children’s verbalizations of their understanding of the appearance-reality distinction in extended discourse. In this study, children below and above 4; 6 years were asked to verbalize the content of four brief video clips of actors handling a deceptive object, e.g. a sponge that looked like a rock. The procedure reduced the potential discourse-pragmatic difficulties associated with responding in the standard appe…
When more is less
Monomorphemic words have been found to influence category formation, as they encode one general category and thus activate it more than other related categories in the same lexical network. On the other hand, multimorphemic words can encode multiple categories from the same network by the multiple forms they combine. Superordinate categories are encoded by sub-lexical forms (e.g., affixes), while the entire words encode lower categories in the hi…
Integrating attachment and linguistic perspectives on the coherence of narratives regarding close relationships
In this multidisciplinary study, we offer an integrative view on the coherence of narratives regarding close relationships. We show how coherence, as conceptualized by attachment researchers, is manifested in discursive syntactic structure, as conceptualized by linguists. To illustrate this correspondence, we use narratives of six mothers about their adolescent child and their relationship. Narratives were elicited with the widely used Five Minut…
Variation of sign parameters in narrative and expository discourse
The paper presents an in-depth study of variation in sign parameters of Israeli Sign Language (ISL). We describe and analyze specific sign parameters and their sub-parameters: handshape, orientation, place of articulation, and movement, as they are distributed in two text-types: narrative and expository discourse. A group of 16 deaf native ISL signers produced 32 texts containing a total of 6,875 signs which were then analyzed from a bottom-up ap…
Decomposition in early stages of learning novel morphologically derived words
A hidden nusach
The study focuses on an individual rabbi from early-modern Poland, Maharam of Lublin, and on his proficiency as a writer. We explore the Maharam's competence in recruiting different linguistic devices to serve both specific textual functions and the overall communicative function of the text. Taking the combined perspectives of historical discourse analysis and usage-based corpus linguistics, we analyse one responsum as an example of this histori…
“Where did you go to?” recognizing child agency as it emerges dynamically in interaction
The paper presents an in-depth analysis of a shared mother-toddler book-reading activity. We build on critiques of progressive approaches to child education and warn against the subtle subversion of children’s agency. Our praxis-based analysis interprets the child’s initiatives as they emerge dynamically during the interaction, revealing their underlying systematic structure independently of the predetermined trajectory prescribed by the mother’s…
Linguistic Variation, Discourse Analysis, and Deaf Education
Variation in language has been acknowledged as central to the characterization of spoken and written discourse. Speakers’ ability to change and adjust language according to the communicative circumstances is a prominent factor that demonstrates their linguistic literacy and skill. Nonetheless, few studies have explored the characterization of discursively motivated variation in sign languages, and little is known about the topic. The purpose of t…
Emotional engagement in expressive writing
HaCohen et al. (2018) identified three types of narratives that emerge in the context of integrating a difficult event into one’s life story. We use their identification while focusing on the quality of emotional involvement evidenced in texts, and combining it with an abstract-content text analysis. This allows us to quantify emotional engagement in Expressive Writing (EW) texts. We analyze personal-experience narratives produced in EW, and exam…
Arabic teenagers' attitudes to electronic writing in Arabizi
Resonance as a resource for stance-taking in narratives
This paper traces the recurrence and manipulation of devices in monologic narrative texts produced by university students based on a semi-structured elicitation. It focuses on a detailed analysis of multiple texts produced by different speaker-writers of Hebrew, to illustrate the function of structural resonance of both clauses and combinations of clauses (Clause Packages). The analyses show that while lexical devices reflect a more distanced (le…
The power of engagement
Preview this article: The power of engagement, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/fol.24.1.01nir-1.gif
Frames for clause combining
The present study joins recent endeavors within Construction Grammar to recognize constructions that are beyond clauses and sentences and function as schematic frames for the organization of discourse. Specifically, it deals with two particular instances of what is termed a discourse pattern , the conventionalized combination of genre and text-type: a personal experience narrative and an expository discussion of a personal opinion on an abstract …
Clause combining across grammars
The goal of the present study is to examine whether clause-combining rhetorical preferences that differentiate between Hebrew and English are maintained across grammars, specifically, in the context of text production in a non-native language. It examines the usage of various bi-clausal constructions marking different levels of event integration in texts written by advanced speakers of English, all native monolingual Hebrew speakers. The data ana…
Computational evaluation of the Traceback Method
Several models of language acquisition have emerged in recent years that rely on computational algorithms for simulation and evaluation. Computational models are formal and precise, and can thus provide mathematically well-motivated insights into the process of language acquisition. Such models are amenable to robust computational evaluation, using technology that was developed for Information Retrieval and Computational Linguistics. In this arti…
The Acquisition of Noun Plurals among Early Sequential Russian-Hebrew Speaking Bilinguals
The focus of the present study was the trajectory of the acquisition of noun pluralization in Hebrew as a window into the development of inflectional morphology among early sequential Russian-Hebrew speaking bilinguals. Our participants were six early sequential bilingual children between 36 and 42 months of age at the beginning of the study, who acquired Russian (L1) at home and at preschool within a ‘first language first approach’ and whose age…
Complementation in linear and dialogic syntax
This study investigates the interaction between linear and dialogic syntax in Hebrew conversation. Analyzing resonance in divergently aligned contexts, we examine a particular dialogic modification of complex syntactic constructions: the embedding of one construction within the scope of another. Specifically, we examine a family of constructions which, in the terms of linear syntax, are analyzed as forms of complementation (via the complementizer…
Formulations on Israeli political talk radio
This article explores the properties of formulations in a corpus of Hebrew radio phone-ins by juxtaposing two theoretical frameworks: conversation analysis (CA) and dialogic syntax. This combination of frameworks is applied towards explaining an anomalous interaction in the collection - a caller’s marked, unexpected rejection of a formulation of gist produced by the radio phone-in’s host. Our analysis shows that whereas previous CA studies of for…
Parts of speech as constructions
The paper re-appraises accepted classifications of linguistic elements into word-level constructions on the one hand and in terms of Parts-of-Speech systems on the other from the point of view of Construction Grammar (CxG). We focus on a particular adverbial construction in Hebrew, with the surface form PrepOC, where “Prep” is one of the four basic prepositions in the language and OC stands for fixed forms of a lexically restricted group of Nouns…
The lexicon in writing–speech-differentiation
The study analyzed text-embedded lexical usage as diagnostic of writing-speech-distinctions in stories and discussions produced in the two modalities by English-speaking grade-school children, middle-school pre-adolescents, high-school adolescents, and adults. We assumed that (1) while children master writing as a notational system by age 9 to 10 years, command of written language as a special style of discourse has a long developmental trajector…
Complex syntax as a window on contrastive rhetoric
Complementation in linear and dialogic syntax
This study investigates the interaction between linear and dialogic syntax in Hebrew conversation. Analyzing resonance in divergently aligned contexts, we examine a particular dialogic modification of complex syntactic constructions: the embedding of one construction within the scope of another. Specifically, we examine a family of constructions which, in the terms of linear syntax, are analyzed as forms of complementation (via the complementizer…
Complex syntax as a window on contrastive rhetoric
Arabic teenagers' attitudes to electronic writing in Arabizi
Formulations on Israeli political talk radio
This article explores the properties of formulations in a corpus of Hebrew radio phone-ins by juxtaposing two theoretical frameworks: conversation analysis (CA) and dialogic syntax. This combination of frameworks is applied towards explaining an anomalous interaction in the collection - a caller’s marked, unexpected rejection of a formulation of gist produced by the radio phone-in’s host. Our analysis shows that whereas previous CA studies of for…
Parts of speech as constructions
The paper re-appraises accepted classifications of linguistic elements into word-level constructions on the one hand and in terms of Parts-of-Speech systems on the other from the point of view of Construction Grammar (CxG). We focus on a particular adverbial construction in Hebrew, with the surface form PrepOC, where “Prep” is one of the four basic prepositions in the language and OC stands for fixed forms of a lexically restricted group of Nouns…
The lexicon in writing–speech-differentiation
The study analyzed text-embedded lexical usage as diagnostic of writing-speech-distinctions in stories and discussions produced in the two modalities by English-speaking grade-school children, middle-school pre-adolescents, high-school adolescents, and adults. We assumed that (1) while children master writing as a notational system by age 9 to 10 years, command of written language as a special style of discourse has a long developmental trajector…
Complex syntax as a window on contrastive rhetoric
Clause combining across grammars
The goal of the present study is to examine whether clause-combining rhetorical preferences that differentiate between Hebrew and English are maintained across grammars, specifically, in the context of text production in a non-native language. It examines the usage of various bi-clausal constructions marking different levels of event integration in texts written by advanced speakers of English, all native monolingual Hebrew speakers. The data ana…
Computational evaluation of the Traceback Method
Several models of language acquisition have emerged in recent years that rely on computational algorithms for simulation and evaluation. Computational models are formal and precise, and can thus provide mathematically well-motivated insights into the process of language acquisition. Such models are amenable to robust computational evaluation, using technology that was developed for Information Retrieval and Computational Linguistics. In this arti…
The Acquisition of Noun Plurals among Early Sequential Russian-Hebrew Speaking Bilinguals
The focus of the present study was the trajectory of the acquisition of noun pluralization in Hebrew as a window into the development of inflectional morphology among early sequential Russian-Hebrew speaking bilinguals. Our participants were six early sequential bilingual children between 36 and 42 months of age at the beginning of the study, who acquired Russian (L1) at home and at preschool within a ‘first language first approach’ and whose age…
Complementation in linear and dialogic syntax
This study investigates the interaction between linear and dialogic syntax in Hebrew conversation. Analyzing resonance in divergently aligned contexts, we examine a particular dialogic modification of complex syntactic constructions: the embedding of one construction within the scope of another. Specifically, we examine a family of constructions which, in the terms of linear syntax, are analyzed as forms of complementation (via the complementizer…
Formulations on Israeli political talk radio
This article explores the properties of formulations in a corpus of Hebrew radio phone-ins by juxtaposing two theoretical frameworks: conversation analysis (CA) and dialogic syntax. This combination of frameworks is applied towards explaining an anomalous interaction in the collection - a caller’s marked, unexpected rejection of a formulation of gist produced by the radio phone-in’s host. Our analysis shows that whereas previous CA studies of for…
Frames for clause combining
The present study joins recent endeavors within Construction Grammar to recognize constructions that are beyond clauses and sentences and function as schematic frames for the organization of discourse. Specifically, it deals with two particular instances of what is termed a discourse pattern , the conventionalized combination of genre and text-type: a personal experience narrative and an expository discussion of a personal opinion on an abstract …
Resonance as a resource for stance-taking in narratives
This paper traces the recurrence and manipulation of devices in monologic narrative texts produced by university students based on a semi-structured elicitation. It focuses on a detailed analysis of multiple texts produced by different speaker-writers of Hebrew, to illustrate the function of structural resonance of both clauses and combinations of clauses (Clause Packages). The analyses show that while lexical devices reflect a more distanced (le…
The power of engagement
Preview this article: The power of engagement, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/fol.24.1.01nir-1.gif
Emotional engagement in expressive writing
HaCohen et al. (2018) identified three types of narratives that emerge in the context of integrating a difficult event into one’s life story. We use their identification while focusing on the quality of emotional involvement evidenced in texts, and combining it with an abstract-content text analysis. This allows us to quantify emotional engagement in Expressive Writing (EW) texts. We analyze personal-experience narratives produced in EW, and exam…
Arabic teenagers' attitudes to electronic writing in Arabizi
“Where did you go to?” recognizing child agency as it emerges dynamically in interaction
The paper presents an in-depth analysis of a shared mother-toddler book-reading activity. We build on critiques of progressive approaches to child education and warn against the subtle subversion of children’s agency. Our praxis-based analysis interprets the child’s initiatives as they emerge dynamically during the interaction, revealing their underlying systematic structure independently of the predetermined trajectory prescribed by the mother’s…
Linguistic Variation, Discourse Analysis, and Deaf Education
Variation in language has been acknowledged as central to the characterization of spoken and written discourse. Speakers’ ability to change and adjust language according to the communicative circumstances is a prominent factor that demonstrates their linguistic literacy and skill. Nonetheless, few studies have explored the characterization of discursively motivated variation in sign languages, and little is known about the topic. The purpose of t…
Variation of sign parameters in narrative and expository discourse
The paper presents an in-depth study of variation in sign parameters of Israeli Sign Language (ISL). We describe and analyze specific sign parameters and their sub-parameters: handshape, orientation, place of articulation, and movement, as they are distributed in two text-types: narrative and expository discourse. A group of 16 deaf native ISL signers produced 32 texts containing a total of 6,875 signs which were then analyzed from a bottom-up ap…
Decomposition in early stages of learning novel morphologically derived words
A hidden nusach
The study focuses on an individual rabbi from early-modern Poland, Maharam of Lublin, and on his proficiency as a writer. We explore the Maharam's competence in recruiting different linguistic devices to serve both specific textual functions and the overall communicative function of the text. Taking the combined perspectives of historical discourse analysis and usage-based corpus linguistics, we analyse one responsum as an example of this histori…
When more is less
Monomorphemic words have been found to influence category formation, as they encode one general category and thus activate it more than other related categories in the same lexical network. On the other hand, multimorphemic words can encode multiple categories from the same network by the multiple forms they combine. Superordinate categories are encoded by sub-lexical forms (e.g., affixes), while the entire words encode lower categories in the hi…
Integrating attachment and linguistic perspectives on the coherence of narratives regarding close relationships
In this multidisciplinary study, we offer an integrative view on the coherence of narratives regarding close relationships. We show how coherence, as conceptualized by attachment researchers, is manifested in discursive syntactic structure, as conceptualized by linguists. To illustrate this correspondence, we use narratives of six mothers about their adolescent child and their relationship. Narratives were elicited with the widely used Five Minut…
In their own words
Little is known about pre-school children’s verbalizations of their understanding of the appearance-reality distinction in extended discourse. In this study, children below and above 4; 6 years were asked to verbalize the content of four brief video clips of actors handling a deceptive object, e.g. a sponge that looked like a rock. The procedure reduced the potential discourse-pragmatic difficulties associated with responding in the standard appe…
Effects of Systematicity on Word Learning in Preschool Children
This study investigated the role of systematicity in word learning, focusing on Semitic morpho-phonology where words exhibit multiple levels of systematicity. Building upon previous research on phonological templates, we explored how systematicity based on such templates, whether they encode meanings or not, influenced word learning in preschool-age Hebrew-speaking children. We examined form–meaning systematicity, where words share phonological t…
Linguistics (18 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Narrative (8 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (6 works) · Artificial Intelligence (5 works) · Cognitive psychology (5 works) · Communication (5 works)