Morphology

, Volume 23, Issue 4, pp 409–440 | Cite as

Decomposing the feminine suffixes of Modern Hebrew: a morpho-syntactic analysis

Original Paper
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Abstract

The feminine suffixes -at, -et, -it, -ut, -ot of Modern Hebrew are regularly treated as morphologically simplex. In this paper, I argue for the decomposition of -it and -ut into -i-t and -u-t on the basis of semantic, phonological and morphological evidence. The paper has two parts. In the first part, the data and the main claims are presented. The feminine suffix is defined as -t. The distribution and function of -i- and -u- in the feminine suffixes are defined, and both -i- and -u- are shown to carry similar functions elsewhere in the language, without the feminine -t. A novel analysis of the plural analysis is also presented. The second part is an application to the data of Lowenstamm’s (Derivational affixes as roots (phasal spellout meets English stress shift). Ms., LLF, 2010, to appear) specific view of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz in The view from building 20, pp. 111–176. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1993). Through this formal analysis, -i- is shown to be a structurally expletive morpheme. The morpheme -u- is analyzed as its [-concrete] alternant. The latter is shown to appear in both concatenative and non-concatenative suffixes, thus illustrating an understudied possible consequence of the non-concatenative nature of Semitic morphology. The framework adopted—the version of Distributed Morphology in Lowenstamm (Roots, Oxford University Publishing, to appear)—receives support in the success of the analysis.

Keywords

Distributed morphology Semitic Hebrew Feminine suffixes Bound roots 
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.The Hebrew UniversityJerusalemIsrael

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