Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics

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Subject: Language and Linguistics

Edited by: Geoffrey Khan


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Word Formation

(3,142 words)

Author(s): Sadan (Tsuguya Sasaki), Tsvi
1. Introduction Word formation is concerned with how words, or to be more precise, lexemes, are formed through various morphological processes from bases and morphemes, which in Modern Hebrew may be either discontinuous or linear; discontinuous morphemes include roots and patterns, while linear morphemes include affixes (prefixes and suffixes). The word formation of Modern Hebrew can be classified into the following seven formal types according to three parameters: (1) whether the type of word formation in question is discontinuous [+] or line…

Word Order: Biblical Hebrew

(5,209 words)

Author(s): Moshavi, Adina
All languages permit a variety of word-order constructions, with subject (S), verb (V), objects (O), and adjuncts (A) occupying varying positions relative to each other (Greenberg 1996a; 1996b). Usually one construction is pragmatically neutral, occurring in a wide variety of discourse contexts, while the others have more restricted uses. The word order with the broadest contextual distribution is the unmarked or basic one, and the others are marked (Dryer 1995). Marked word order constructions generally have pragmatic meaning; that is, they encode aspects of m…

Word Order: Modern Hebrew

(2,917 words)

Author(s): Ilani, Noga | Shlomo, Sigal | Goldberg, Dina
1. Standard Word Order in Modern Hebrew In sentences with an overt subject, the normal word order in Modern Hebrew is subject-verb-object (and possibly adverbial), as in העיתונאי הקשיב לסיפור בעניין רב ha-ʿitonay hiqšiv la-sipur be-ʿinyan rav ‘The journalist listened to the story with great interest’. In this sentence the subject is העיתונאי ha-ʿitonay ‘the journalist’, the verb is הקשיב hiqšiv ‘listened’, the object is לסיפור la-sipur ‘to the story’, and the adverbial (of manner) is בעניין רב be-ʿinyan rav ‘with great interest’. Modern Hebrew is thus a subject-verb-object…

Word Order: Rabbinic Hebrew

(2,876 words)

Author(s): Shivtiel, Avihai
Although Rabbinic Hebrew shares many syntactical structures with Biblical Hebrew, a large number of sentences differ from the biblical model. However, as the structures of many sentences are variegated, the following discussion deals only with the most common types in Rabbinic Hebrew. Special cases are found in the literature mentioned in the References section. Most languages, including Hebrew, single out five main types of sentences: (1) simple; (2) inclusive; (3) compound; (4) complex; and (5) periodic. 1. The Simple Sentence The simple sentence is regarded ‘simple’ becau…

Word Pairs

(768 words)

Author(s): Baranowski, Krzysztof J.
In psycholinguistics and psychoanalysis the term ‘word pairs’ refers to both stimuli and the responses they trigger in a word association test. Word pairs reveal preferred associations, and the total sum of words given in response to a stimulus can be considered the associative meaning of the stimulus. In the study of Biblical Hebrew word pairs (also called ‘fixed pairs’ and/or ‘parallel pairs’) are defined as couples of corresponding words that occur in the parallel lines of poetic texts. Two examples from among literally hundreds are the following (one with nouns, one with verbs): (a) אָ…