This volume presents a collection of specially commissioned papers devoted to analyzing the linguistics of Modern Hebrew from a number of perspectives. Various aspects of Modern Hebrew grammar are discussed including the structure of the lexicon, grammatical features and inflectional morphology, as well as the grammaticalization of semantic and pragmatic distinctions. The psycholinguistic issues addressed include the acquisition of morphological knowledge, the pro-drop parameter and question formation, as well as language use in hearing-impaired native speakers. The collection of these papers together in a single volume allows these phenomena to be considered not in isolation but in the context of the grammatical system of which the language is an expression. As a consequence, more general issues connected to Modern Hebrew begin to emerge, such as the role of the inflectional morphological system in the grammar, and a rich set of facts and analyses relevant for many related issues are made available to the reader.

This books presents the most comprehensive description and analysis to date of Hebrew morphology, with an emphasis on the verbal templates. Its aim is to develop a theory of argument structure alternations which is anchored in the syntax but has systematic interfaces with the phonology and the semantics. Concretely, the monograph argues for a specific formal system centered around possible values of the head Voice. The formal assumptions are as similar as possible to those made in work on non-Semitic languages. The first part of the book (four chapters) is devoted to Hebrew; the second part (two chapters) compares the current theory with other approaches to Voice and argument structure in the recent literature.

Routledge Revivals presents a reissue of Noam Chomksy’s MA thesis, written in 1951, and first published in 1979. Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew is a landmark study in linguistics and generative phonology, which provides not only an analysis of morphophonemics but of the entire grammar of Modern Hebrew from syntax to phonology. Professor Chomsky’s goal in this thesis is nothing less than a complete generative grammar of the Hebrew language. This work is of singular importance as it contains the genesis of the author’s work in the field of generative grammar which has had such a profound impact upon the study of linguistics. This reissue of a truly pioneering work will be of great interest to all those concerned with generative grammar and its origins, and with the progression of thought of one of the greatest minds of our time.

This book investigates the nature and properties of roots, the core elements of word meaning. In particular, chapters examine the interaction of roots with syntactic structure, and the role of their semantic and morpho-phonological properties in that interaction. Issues addressed in the book include the semantics and phonology of roots in isolation and in context; the categorial specification of roots; and the role of phases in word formation.Internationally recognized scholars approach these topics from a variety of theoretical backgrounds, drawing on data from languages including German, Hebrew, and Modern Greek. The book will be of interest to linguistics students and researchers of all theoretical persuasions from graduate level upwards.

Research into cross-linguistic aspects and typology of word-formation has not been paid relevant and systematic attention by morphologists, and only a few articles dealing with various word-formation issues of this kind appear in journals. The chapters in this volume address this issue by discussing, on contrastive principles, important questions of word-formation in a sample of 26 languages. The focus of the book, as a whole, is on typological features of word-formation in the languages sampled. It is aimed at researchers that have an interest in word-formation in a variety of languages.

The contributions in this volume are devoted to various aspects of the internal and external syntax of DPs in a wide variety of languages belonging to the Slavic, Turkic, Finno-Ugric, Semitic and Germanic language families. In particular, the papers address questions related to the internal and external cartography of various types of simplex and complex DPs: the position of DPs within larger structures, agreement in phi-features and/or case between DPs and their predicates, as well as between sub-elements of DPs, and/or the assignment of case to DPs in specific configurations. The first four chapters of the book focus primarily on the external syntax of DPs, and the remaining chapters deal with their internal syntax.