Abstract
In Modern Hebrew, prefixoids such as tat ‘sub’, χad ‘mono’, etc. appear on nouns and suffixed adjectives. The status of the prefixoid is not clear: in some respects, it behaves like the morphological head, but in others it behaves like the dependent. Focusing on tat ‘sub’, this paper provides both the first thorough description of such an item and a morphological analysis. It is claimed that the prefixoid is always a nominal modifier. In some configurations, the modified nominal structure is null. These claims are shown to account for the selectional restrictions of the prefixoid, as well as the agreement and inflection patterns of the different items with tat.
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Notes
Kahana (1998) is the only exception I am aware of. This sociolinguistically-oriented dissertation provides a list of prefixoids in Modern Hebrew and traces their gradual introduction into Modern Hebrew.
It is no coincidence that these pre-nominal and pre-adjectival particles all have analogues in English. According to the Academy of the Hebrew Language, their introduction into Modern Hebrew was modeled on European languages (Gadish, 2016). In addition to the etymologically Semitic prefixoids in the text, there are also borrowed prefixoids, such as pʁo/anti-, psewdo-, pʁoto- etc.; these cannot carry inflectional markers.
Henceforth, stress is unmarked when final, and marked with an acute accent when penultimate.
Note that the inflectional pattern in (7e–h) is also different from that of Adj+N. In contrast to (7h), the plural form of e.g. ktan emuna ‘of little faith’, headed by the adjective katan, can never be ktan emun-ot, with plurality marked only on the noun.
There are also some adjectives with -i that are not derived from a noun, e.g. ʁiʃm-i ‘official’ and loans like patét-i ‘pathetic’. Interestingly, it may be claimed these are also perceived as complex, as evidenced by cases of back-formation like patet ‘pathetic person’.
Interestingly, tat muda ‘sub-conscious’ is derived from an adjectival templatic passive muda ‘conscious (adj.)’, but the item is a noun, not an adjective. Here is the place to mention a couple of marginal exceptions pointed out by a reviewer, e.g. tat-adom ‘sub-red’ and tat-zaiʁ ‘sub-miniscule’.
A reviewer asks why, given (16) and the analogy between tat nouns and the Nhead+Nmodifier construction, the latter type of item is never subject to adjectivization, e.g. pkid mas-i ‘of a tax clerk’ (though there are rare examples such as bejt sifr-i ‘of school’, derived from bejt séfer ‘school’). This interesting question belongs to a larger study on the formation of adjectives in -i.
A related issue is the following. Templatic adjectives can be derived from nouns, e.g. mélaχ ‘salt’ => malúaχ ‘salted’. In principle, the adjectival head in (16) could have been expressed by a template, rather than -i. But in that case, it would apply to tat kaʁka in its entirety, including the prefixoid tat. Attachment of -i is the preferred strategy, if only on the basis of the transparency of the outcome. Adjectives like tat-malúaχ are not expected to exist.
Another possible motivation for this movement is prosodic. tat is never stressed; if it did not move with its complement, it would be stranded in the phrase-final position in which, like a modifier N (e.g. pkìd más ‘tax clerk’), it would have to carry main stress. I will not have more to say about this movement.
The structure with tat seleting a null head cannot serve as the basis for adjectival formation; this would derive the contentless tat-i.
There might be good phonological reason for gender to be absent from tat: the default gender markers in MH constructs are /-at/ and /-ot/. Their suffixation would yield ?tat-at and ?tat-ot, which would be subject to OCP considerations due to the segmental similarity with the base. Similarly, the particle du ‘bi’ in du kʁav ‘duel’, flatly rejects the plural suffix, probably because it is vowel-final: *du-ej kʁav (cf. χad ‘mono’ in χad kéʁen ‘unicorn’, χad-ej kéʁen ‘unicorns’).
If features can be inherent on pro, one expects also cases of singular tat tzuna which do not trigger feminine agreement, e.g. tat tzunafsg mezaazéamsg ‘shocking under-nutrition’. I have indeed found such cases.
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Acknowledgement
I thank Bar Avineri for reading a draft of this paper and commenting on it, and for encouraging me to write it.
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Faust, N. Modern Hebrew prefixoids: description and morpho-syntactic analysis. Morphology 32, 25–44 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-021-09385-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-021-09385-7