Verb.

1988

Hebrew, as other ~emitic languages, has a rich morpl1ology, observable in part by the complexity of verb inflections. The primary base of verbs in Hebrew is the past third singular form of tlfe verb. From this base, some twenty eight different inflected forms can be created according to tense, per~on, gender and number. Traditionally, inflection tables were used to describe the various inflected forms derived from the verb 'base. Research done by Oman has managed to describe the verb inflection process using the principles of Generative Grammar. In' this approach, inflCfted verb forms are viewed as constructs of the form preftx+base+sufftx. Verb inflection is described as a s~ries of sequentialpperations. The first stage converts the primary verb base to a secondary'base, when the secondary base is not the same as the primary base. Secondly, the appropriate prefix and/or suffix are concatenated to the base. Thirdly, several morpho-phonemic changes due to the affix concat...

Hebrew Annual Review, 1982

Reinvestigation of Modern Hebrew verb formation strategies suggests that assignment of recent as well as potential innovations to canonical morphological forms in the verb system is essentially semantic, and is based on the notions "causation," "agency" and "activity." It is claimed that the basic division is not between transitive and intransitive verbs, but rather into agentive and nonagentive ones, the latter being normally realized in hit pa 'el. Causative agentives tend to be assigned to hif'il, noncausative agentives to pi'el (which may also allow causatives with nonactive patients). The great productivity of pi 'el, which is often attributed to its phonological elasticity, is also due in part to its allowing transitive as well as intransitive noncausative agentives, the natural semantic category for denominative verbs. The three semantic notions are integrated into a 'control' continuum the like of which may be found in other languages.

Shofar An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

Morphology, 2020

A main challenge for language users is forging reliable relationships between words with shared components so that morphology as a system emerges from usage. For native Hebrew acquisition this means that learners acquire verbs as lexical entities, which form into a system based on Semitic roots and binyan conjugations. The Hebrew verb system is consequently organized by derivational families, where verbs in different binyan conjugations share the same root. This is illustrated by the kt-b-based family containing katav 'write', nixtav 'be written', hixtiv 'dictate', huxtav 'be dictated', kitev 'carbon copy [cc]', kutav 'be cc'ed', and hitkatev 'correspond'. The current study offers a systematic account of how Hebrew verb families and their components-verb lemmas, roots and binyan patterns-emerge and develop in structural and semantic terms, covering the long route from infancy to adulthood. The study is grounded in a large database (485,908 word tokens) compiled of the spoken and written productions of Hebrew-speaking toddlers, children, adolescents and adults. The study is presented in two parts. Part I describes the general characteristics of the study database with regards to the distributions of verbs, roots and binyan verb conjugations, focusing on developmental changes as indicators of the growth and consolidation of the verb lexicon. Part II presents the development of root-based verb derivational families in terms of family frequency, family size, family composition and the semantic coherence of families. Based on the empirical evidence in this paper, our main claim is that roots, binyan conjugations and derivational verb families are all emergent properties of the verb system as it develops in variegated communicative contexts.

Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, John Benjamin's, 2003

Bolozky (1978, 1999) argues that choice of patterns in which innovations are realized is semantically triggered. At the same time, innovators attempt to preserve, whenever possible, the transparency of the (usually denominative) stem on which the innovation is based, mostly by maintaining its original consonant clustering. It appears that the speaker's target verb pattern can broadly be characterized as a structure composed of expandable consonantal slots, and that what makes the base most opaque is splitting its original consonant clusters between these slots by means of a vowel. Bat-El (1994) makes similar observations, but claims that cluster preservation is only a corollary, not a principle in itself. This article reaffirms the primacy of transparency preservation as a basic principle, and claims that when neologizing, speakers resort to either one of two strategies: (i) Regard a triliteral noun as a typical Hebrew stem, and each of its three consonants as a single 'root' slot, to be extracted and reapplied in the conventional verbforming manner. This is still an active strategy in Israeli Hebrew. (ii) Regard consonant sequences in the base that stay intact throughout as a radical slot that one should try to preserve as much as possible. This strategy is prevalent in quadriliteral nouns or longer, but is not limited to them. If the 'root' notion is to be maintained, it should be viewed as composed of 'radicalslots,' or šoršanim.