Euphemisms are widely used in public discourse in order to obfuscate potentially unwelcome or unacceptable measures and policies, whereas dysphemisms (i.e. their unpleasant counterparts) offer a means of expressing strong feelings on disputed issues. Alternative phrasings denoting the same referent were observed for several topics in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict: depending on the choice between euphemism and dysphemism, they convey profoundly different connotations. This research was conducted through a content analysis of the four most widely circulated Israeli daily newspapers in Hebrew; three subjects – the territories, the separation barrier, and violent actions such as targeted killings and terror attacks – were taken into account in order to highlight the connection between linguistic choices and political stances.
Since Hebrew does not differentiate between intimate and distant pronouns of address, a strategy of deferential address consists in addressing someone by the third person: «indirect address» metaphorically increases distance between speaker and addressee. In a corpus of ancient Hebrew texts (Bible and epigraphy, from the 9th century BCE to the 2nd century CE) where thousands of occurrences of terms of address were analysed, one address out of four is indirect. The strategy is particularly common in highly formal situations where the addressee is higher in rank, such as petitions, military correspondence addressed to a superior, and addresses to a sovereign; for these situations, indirect address is the norm. Nevertheless it occurs in dialogues between peers, on the condition that the speaker feels in danger or the circumstances are unfavourable to him/her. The term mainly used in association with indirect address is a title; as for my lord and the king, the use of the third person is predominant, being almost the rule, and it happened to be rendered with the second person in ancient versions of the Bible. The second section of the paper deals with syntactic irregularities concurring with indirect address: a lack of person agreement appears in the sentence when the speaker refers to the addressee both by the third and the second person. Two examples are provided and analysed in order to illustrate how extra-linguistic variables can interfere, or not, with the structure of the sentence. The examination of this phenomenon, which is not rare in Biblical Hebrew, had such an outcome that should be of interest to general linguists as well: sociolinguistic and pragmatic factors compel the speaker to oscillate between the reference to the external reality and the inner reference to a fictive reality, the latter created through the language for a particular purpose.
The first play staged after Israel's Independence in May 1948, Moshe Shamir's He walked in the fields, was regarded as a secret weapon in the ongoing war. Its hero, young kibbutznik and fighter Uri, was the embodiment of the New Israeli Jew, one of the founding myths of the nation. The birth of a Hebrew-language theatre few decades before had closely intertwined with the national and linguistic revival in the Land of Israel. Hebrew theatre and the Zionist enterprise were in a two-way relationship, advancing in parallel towards shared goals, with the political establishment supporting the arts and the arts reinforcing national ideology. The hero created and hitherto promoted on stage found his death right on the stage after the 1967 Six-Day War. In the euphoric and triumphant national mood following the recent victory, Hanoch Levin's satirical cabarets abruptly introduced new narratives of the war, ridiculing the sacred national values and rejecting the rhetoric of sacrifice. The shows were met with hostility by many, yet the the heroic narrative had been called into question once and for all, freeing Hebrew theatre from its role in the national enterprise and paving the way to more mature drama.
