Bolozky 2003. The ‘roots’ of denominative Hebrew verbs (original) (raw)
2003, Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, John Benjamin's
Abstract
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.
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