CONTENTS

Shmuel Bolozky and Nimrod Shatil The Articulation of Two Groups of Medical Terms in Israeli Hebrew  7

Oshri Zighelboim “The Peace War" – The Semantic Relationship Between the Terms ‘War' and ‘Peace' in School Anthologies  19

Rachel Tal The Case of the Responsa Language of Medieval Provence  45

Pnina Trummer, Rama Manor and Avi Gvura Bleaching of Verbs of Motion Introducing a Periphrastic Structure  65

Bat-Zion Yemini The High Prevalence of the Haqtala Pattern in Contemporary Hebrew  89

Lior Laks The Hebrew maCCuC Pattern: Morphological and Semantic Examination  105

Hilla Polak-Yitzhaki Constraints of Evidentiality Shaping the Verb Introducing Constructed Dialogue in Spoken Hebrew Discourse  131

Tamar Zewi Directive He in Hebrew Through the Ages  173

English Abstracts  V

ABSTRACTS

THE ARTICULATION OF TWO GROUPS OF MEDICAL TERMS IN ISRAELI HEBREW

Shmuel Bolozky and Nimrod Shatil

When examining all words with the +ija suffix in Israeli Hebrew, one finds that most of them carry final stress; only some place names and a few borrowings are stressed penultimately, i.e., +íja. The placement of stress in borrowed words usually maintains its location in the source language; important roles were played by the major substratum languages of the “revivers” of spoken Modern Hebrew: Polish, Russian and Yiddish. Two of these, Polish and Yiddish, are typically stressed penultimately. Generally, when an Israeli Hebrew speaker articulates borrowed words ending with the +ja suffix without vowel marks (which is the normal way s/he encounters them), s/he follows the Polish stress pattern: demokrátja, geográfja, psixológja, etc. Nevertheless, the medical term ‘colonoscopy’ is articulated by most speakers not as kolonoskópja, but as kolonoskopíja, i.e., following the Greek original (possibly through the intermediacy of Russian). The same stress pattern can be found in other items ending with -skop(i)ja and with -tom(i)ja, but essentially only in the medical community or with people associated with this community, as well as with members of the public with whom they are in contact. The term for colonoscopy is commonly used today, and thus its articulation by doctors, nurses etc. has expanded fairly widely, but all other related items are normally articulated the Polish (and Yiddish) way, with the preceding i elided and stress falling on the preceding stem vowel, as in the well-known Polish conversion: maríya ‘Mary’> márya… The likelihood of “Greek style” articulation is a function of how frequent the item is, and only ‘colonoscopy’ is sufficiently frequent. The test we conducted confirms that in spite of the influence of the medical community, the “Polish” stress style is still the default one, even for most of these medical terms.

“THE PEACE WAR” – THE SEMANTIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE TERMS ‘WAR’ AND ‘PEACE’ IN SCHOOL ANTHOLOGIES

Oshri Zighelboim

This study deals in the semantic-cognitive analysis of the terms war and peace in school anthologies across different sectors of education. These terms reflect the battle between the various stakeholders who bestow them with the meanings that they perceive as important and use them to educate students – in line with their perceptions and ideologies.

The texts analyzed in this study were all taken from school anthologies that were published in different times, from the establishment of the State of Israel until today. They are used for fifth and sixth grade students in three different sectors of the Jewish education system sector in Israel: state-secular, state-religious, and ultra-orthodox (Haredi) education. Additional texts analyzed were taken from the reading lists of anthroposophical schools who do not have school anthologies. The corpus was analyzed from three aspects: a semantic-synchronic investigation between all anthologies that were published at a certain period of time; a semantic-diachronic investigation that focused on changes made to newer editions of the same anthology; and a comparative analysis between the anthologies of the different sectors of education.

A semantic-cognitive analysis of the terms war and peace exposes a range of meanings and relationships between the two, most often perceived as contradictory. While war is a more linguistical clear-cut term, with arguments made for or against it, peace is a more ambiguous and hard-to-define term. The fact that the Hebrew word shalom [peace] is referentially precarious, and the lack of clear semantic boundaries between the two, render the term peace an important subject of research.

The findings show a range of relationships between the two terms: war as a prerequisite for peace; a connection between war and religion, which provides the term war with a positive connotation; dealing with negative peace by focusing on the objection to war rather than on the values of peace itself; characterizing peace through war-related terms; emphasizing the prices paid and sacrifices made in an attempt to achieve peace; and the connection between the field of peace of the field of war. In the relationship between these two, it is the field of war that takes over the field of peace. Moreover, the erosion of the basis conflict between the two fields is a result of the Hebrew word shalom [peace] being referentially precarious, which projects onto the perception of war and peace within Israeli society.

THE CASE OF THE RESPONSA LANGUAGE OF MEDIEVAL PROVENCE

Rachel Tal

In the following article I will discuss aspects of the Hebrew used by Rabbi Abraham ben Isaac (also known as RABad II) of Narbonne in his responsa. RABad II was one of the most illustrious Jewish scholars in Provence in the High Medieval Period. 

The origin of Jewish settlement in southern France is surrounded by myth. Not much is known about it, nor about the first few hundred years of Jewish life in southern Gallia. It is likely that the beginning of Jewish life in Provence goes back to the fateful years after the destruction of Jerusalem and the second Temple (70 CE). Yet, concrete evidence can be traced only from the 4th century onward. Moreover, the first extant rabbinic literature texts from Provence are dated to the late 11th century – a long period after the Jewish community settled down in the region. The flowering of Jewish life in Provence occurred later, in the 12th and the 13th centuries. RABad II of Narbonne (1080/5-1158) belongs to the beginning of this period. R. Abraham was Av-Bet-Din (head of the rabbinic court) of Narbonne, as well as the head of a rabbinic academy (yeshiva) there. Several of his students became prominent halakhic figures in other congregations all over the region. RABad II also authored a book of halakhic rulings – Sefer HaEshkol.

The corpus for the following research is a collection of responsa found in two manuscripts copied around the 15th and 16th centuries. For the purpose of this work, the principal witness is a MS Guenzburg 566, which was described by Prof. S. Emanuel in his book Teshubot HaGeonim HaH̱adashot. The second witness is MS Qapah 85, Teshubot HaRaavi and HaRaabad (RABad II and RABad III responsa), which was emended by Rabbi Y. Qapah in his book. The corpus incorporates a unique phenomenon: identical, parallel responsa located in different places in the manuscripts. The results of this study are based on around 5,000 words of these parallel answers.

BLEACHING OF VERBS OF MOTION INTRODUCING A PERIPHRASTIC STRUCTURE

Pnina Trummer, Rama Manor and Avi Gvura

The paper deals with the bleaching of the verbs of motion yatsa’, ba’ and halakh when they introduce a periphrastic structure and are complemented with a verbal noun, as in yatsa’  la-milhama (“went to war”), hotsi’ la-horeg (“executed”), ba’ be-ta’not (“complained”), hevi’ hibuk (“hugged”), halakh leibud (“got lost”). The research corpus includes examples from dictionaries of contemporary Hebrew and from everyday online spoken discourse.

In the course of bleaching, the motion verb’s meaning is eroded through the mediation of a metaphorical shift based on the metaphor of containment (Johnson, 1987). The motion verb loses specific semantic elements that express motion, and from a verb denoting a concrete locative-dynamic event it becomes a helping verb possessing an aspectual meaning of beginning or ending of an action. The paper also deals with the question of the difference between the meaning of a periphrastic structure that opens with a bleached verb of motion and the meaning of the corresponding lexical verb, for example tavi’ hibuk vs. tehabek.

THE HIGH PREVALENCE OF THE HAQTALA PATTERN IN CONTEMPORARY HEBREW

Bat-Zion Yemini

The paper presents the findings of research showing how the use of the haqtala/haf’ala pattern has spread in the four layers of Hebrew. The research examined all the haqtala forms in the Even Shoshan dictionary (1988; 2003) and in the Ariel Comprehensive Dictionary (2007). Also examined were all the neologisms of the Hebrew Language Academy since 1954. The haqtala/aqtala (haspaqa/’aspaqa) forms and forms that do not differ in meaning (hona’a/honaya) were counted only once, but all appearances of homonyms, such as hašxara from šaxor (black) and hašxara from šaxar (dawn), were counted. The examination revealed that in Modern Hebrew, the number of haqtala forms greatly exceeds their number throughout history. In all, 922 nouns in the haqtala pattern were found, divided as follows:

Biblical Hebrew: 4; Sages: 145, Medieval Hebrew: 222, Modern literature to date: 551.

The research shows that commencing with the literature of the Enlightenment and until today, some 60% of haqtala forms were created, indicating that the use of this form in the past 250 years has increased extensively. It is also prevalent in neologisms of the Hebrew language Academy, seemingly owing to its transparency, which aids in understanding the neologism even at the cost of deviation from the rules of the language when no causative verb exists. The research also shows the creativity of living and revitalized Hebrew, and the notable contribution of the haqtala form in the neologisms of the language.

THE HEBREW maCCuC PATTERN: MORPHOLOGICAL AND SEMANTIC EXAMINATION

Lior Laks

This study examines formation in the maCCuC pattern. Some Hebrew adjectives have maCCuC doublets. The adjectives maxrid and maxrud both denote ‘awful’, share the stem consonants x-r-d, but are formed in different patterns. 

Both words in each pair share the same meaning and are used in similar contexts Not all speakers accept maCCuC forms like the ones in (1b) and (2b) (Bolozky 1999,2010), yet web searches reveal that they are productive. In contrast, there are adjectives that do not have maCCuC counterparts, e.g. metunaf – *matnuf ‘filthy’. I show that maCCuC formation (and lack thereof) can be predicted based on the interaction of semantic and morpho-phonological criteria. The article will focus on the morph-phonological aspect. I argue that cases of maCCuC formation can be better explained under word-based approaches without separate reference to the consonantal root.

Such gaps are better explained under word-based approaches (Aronoff 1976, 2007). It provides support to the theory of stem modification (Steriade 1988, McCarthy & Prince 1990, Bat-El 1994,2017, Ussishkin 1999,2005) rather than the extraction of a consonantal root. Root extraction could be performed on any base, regardless of its structure.

While most studies on language contact examine borrowed words and borrowed grammatical elements like affixes, there are less studies that examine borrowed prosodic patterns. This case study sheds further light on the nature of non-concatenative morphology and the status of the consonantal root, in addition to the conditions of the usage of this borrowed pattern.

CONSTRAINTS OF EVIDENTIALITY SHAPING THE VERB INTRODUCING CONSTRUCTED DIALOGUE IN SPOKEN HEBREW DISCOURSE

Hilla Polak-Yitzhaki

The study focuses on verbs introducing constructed dialogue (Tannen 1989) (‘direct speech’) (excluding the verb ‘amar [‘say’]) in a corpus of over 11 hours of everyday Hebrew conversation (Maschler et al. 2017). Taking an Interactional Linguistics approach (Selting and Couper-Kuhlen 2001), and following the assumption that different forms must also be different in function, the study investigates the functional difference resulting in employing these various verbs. Analysis shows that the choices speakers make in selecting one group of verbs over another are not random but rather strongly shaped by the way the storyworld interaction had come to the speaker’s knowledge, that is, by evidentiality – a category which is not morphologically encoded in Hebrew and thus believed to have little impact in the language. Thus, when introducing hearsay interactions, a tendency to employ “vivid” verbs – verbs presenting an acoustic or visual image of the interaction (mainly verbs denoting the manner of the act of speaking) – was found. A tendency to employ “vivid” verbs (mainly verbs presenting the agent doing the speaking) was found also when introducing eyewitness interactions. On the other hand, “laconic” verbs, those lacking a visual or acoustic image of the interaction, were largely employed to introduce hypothetical interactions or interactions in which the speaker participated as one of the interlocutors in the storyworld. The study thus finds that the closer the presented interaction is to the speaker’s inner world (e.g., a hypothetical interaction or an interaction in which the speaker had acted as one of the storyworld interlocutors), the higher the tendency to employ verbs which manifest basic semantics (i.e., presenting limited information concerning the interaction and the act of speaking). On the other hand, when presenting hearsay or eyewitness interactions, verbs characterized by unique semantics which ‘revive’ the storyworld interaction tend to be employed. There is iconicity, then, between semantics on the one hand, and the way the speaker experiences the storyworld interaction, on the other.

DIRECTIVE HE IN HEBREW THROUGH THE AGES

Tamar Zewi

The article reviews the use of the directive He, also known as He locale, from its full vivid use indicating primarily direction and also location in Classical Biblical Hebrew, through its decline in late Biblical Hebrew, in the Hebrew language of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and in Rabbinic and Medieval Hebrew, and up to its revival in Early Modern Hebrew and its relatively limited use in Contemporary Hebrew.