The paper analyzes the simple impersonal construction, which is typical of colloquial Hebrew, though it is making headway also into the written language. The construction is built around an indeclinable predicate or an invariable predicate in the third person masculine singular form. The unmarked arrangement of this construction is rhematic, i.e. the predicate appears in initial position:

1.keday (indecl.) lexa et hamixnasayim ha'ele (m.pl.)
   worthwhile to.you OBJ the.pants these
   `You'd better go for these pants'

Predicates that participate in this construction belong to two major semantic groups: modals and existentials, each comprising a number of sub-groups. There is no clear cut semantic division between the groups and the sub-groups, thus predicates may be in more than one group, or they may have contextually contingent meanings within the total range of modal and existential meanings, forming "family relatedness" in Witgenstein's sense.

A predicate in this construction may require two arguments: an optional object, which represents the relevant person and a second argument, which represents the entity whose existence is declared or about which judgment is passed. The syntactic status of the second argument is at stake in the following discussion.

The two most obvious properties of subject and object are subject-predicate agreement and object marking (through case or preposition) respectively. In written/formal style, most of the predicates of this construction are in agreement with the second argument, i.e. the latter is positively marked as subject, while other are clearly marked as objects. In the colloquial language the status of the second argument is unclear. In some cases, as in the example above, the second argument is clearly an object, since it is preceded by the overt object marker et. Such is the situation also when the object is indirect:

2.od lo nim'as lexa mehabdixa hazot?
   yet not fed.up (m.sg.) to.you from.the.joke this (m.pl.)?
   `Aren't you fed up with this joke yet?'

In many cases, however, the second argument lacks both agreement with the predicate as well as any object marking:

3.davka mat'im lexa hamadim
   actually suits (m.sg.) to.you the.uniforms (plurale tantum, m.pl.)
   `The uniform actually suits you'

4.me'anyen hakatava hazot
   interesting (m.sg.) the.report this (f.sg)
   `This report is interesting'

What is most typical of the second argument, then, is the lack of marking, rather than any positive display of its syntactic nature. This is, then, one area of Hebrew syntax where there is a real difference between the formal and the colloquial varieties of Hebrew.

There are about 90 documented examples in the paper. While some are taken from Israeli radio, television, and newspapers, most examples come from Youval Shimoni's (1999) novel kheder `A Room'. Data of this kind are problematic, since they cannot be considered real colloquial Hebrew but rather Hebrew represented as colloquial in a literary text. The results of my study should, therefore, be taken as provisional, and will hopefully be testable when the project of The Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew is accomplished.