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Morpho-thematic Mismatches and Morphological Filling
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This talk addresses the transitive-intransitive alternation in verb formation in Modern Hebrew
(MH) based on both thematic and morphological relations between words. It is commonly
assumed that there are some sort of derivational relations between verbs that participate in
transitivity alternations. In MH, thematically related verbs share the same stem consonants
and are represented in configurations called binyanim. For example, the intransitive alternate
of ximem ‘warm’ (CiCeC) is hitxamem ‘warm up’(hitCaCeC).
I examine cases of puzzling mismatch between the thematic derivation of predicates and the
morphological form they exhibit (Haspelmath 1987, 1993). These are cases, where the
thematic relation between two verbal instances shows that A is derived from B, while the
morphological relation between them indicates that B is formed on the basis of A. Examine
the alternations in (1) and (2).
(1) a. ha-marak ximem et dan
‘The soup warmed Dan’
b. dan hitxamem
‘Dan warmed up’
(2) a. ha-kor hikpi et dan
‘The cold froze Dan’
b. dan kafa
‘Dan froze’
Following Reinhart (2002), I assume both alternations demonstrate the thematic operation
of decausativization, where the intransitive verb is derived from the transitive one by a
reduction of a thematic role of cause. The thematic relation between the two verbs in each
pair is the same. However, the morphological relations are different. In (1), the
morphological formation intertwines with the direction of derivation; the intransitive verb is
formed in hitCaCeC and marked with a prefix /hit-/, and seems to be formed based on the
transitive one. In (2), however, it is the transitive verb that is morphologically marked by a
prefix /hi-/ , and it seems to be formed (in hiCCiC) based on the intransitive one. What
seems thematically to be derived in one direction seems morphologically to be formed in the
opposite direction. I label this conflict ‘morpho-thematic mismatch’. Why does the mismatch
emerge and how can it be accounted for?
To resolve this conflict, I rely on the notion of frozen lexical entries and on the historical
relations between the relevant forms. I argue that in cases like (2), while form A (kafa) is
indeed thematically derived from B (hikpi), B existed in the lexicon as a frozen entry.
Further, form A entered the vocabulary first and was used for the morphological formation of
B. Specifically I propose a mechanism of morphological filling that is independently
motivated and operates according to systematic guidelines.
When attempting to reach generalizations about word formation, one often encounters
sporadic derivational gap, where a rule predicts the existence of a word which does not
actually exist, apparently for no particular reason (e.g. arrival vs. *arrivation). Reinhart
(2002) and Horvath & Siloni (2008) argue for the existence of frozen lexical entries, forms
that do not exist in the actual vocabulary but are assumed to have a representation in the
mental lexicon and can serve as input for derivational operations. Fadlon (to appear) provides
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experimental psycholinguistic evidence for the psychological reality of frozen entries,
showing that frozen transitive alternates of existing decausatives have psychological reality.
There are frozen inputs for decausative verbs in MH. Compare the two decausative verbs
hitrageš ‘become excited’ and hištanek ‘become strangulated’. While hitrageš has a transitive
alternate rigeš ‘make X excited’, hištanek has no transitive alternate, e.g. *šinek . The verb
hištanek can be taken to be derived from a frozen entry that denotes ‘make X strangulated’.
The frozen entries of verbs sometimes ‘defrost’, that is, they surface as actual word.
Diachronic information about the language tells us that at some point some transitive verbs
did not exist while their decausative counterparts did. Up until recently, the decausative verb
hit'alef ‘faint’, for example, had no transitive alternate ‘faint - transitive’. It is assumed that
such a verb was stored in the mental lexicon as a frozen entry. This entry has surfaced in
recent years and the actual verb was formed (ilef ‘faint-transitive’). I label this occurrence as
filling of frozen lexical entries; the morphological mechanism can fill gaps by providing them
with an actual form according to the following guidelines (3).
(3) Morphological Filling of Frozen Lexical Entries (MOFFLE)
a. Frozen lexical entries can surface and receive phonetic and morphological
representation.
b. Determining the shape of defrosting entries takes into account two criteria
(i) the typical thematic status of the morphological candidates
(ii) frequency of the derivational relations within binyan paradigms
How are the MOFFLE guidelines relevant to the mismatch discussed in this talk? I argue
that the derived form existed first and the basic one was morphologically filled later on.
Specifically, the decausative verb kafa entered the language first and had no actual transitive
counterpart. The transitive counterpart existed in the mental lexicon only as a frozen entry. It
is only later on that t he frozen basic entry that denotes ‘freeze-trans.’ defrosts and is
morphologically formed based on its derived counterpart ‘freeze’. A diachronic examination
of the occurrence of MH verbs provides strong support for this explanation, namely, that the
derived form existed first and the basic one was morphologically filled later on.
While the proposed analysis accounts for the transitive-decausative alternation in this
study, it can be expanded to other valence changing relations like reflexivization, or any cases
of a mismatch between morphological and thematic relations. Time permitting, I will show
that the same analysis also applies for the verbal paradigms of Palestinian Arabic.
References
Fadlon, Julie. To appear. The psychological reality of hidden lexical entries: Evidence from
Hebrew. In M. Everaert, M. Marelj & T. Siloni (eds.), The Theta System: Argument
Structure at the Interface. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Haspelmath, Martin. 1987. Transitivity alternations of the anticausative type.
(Arbeitspapiere, N.F., Nr. 4) Cologne: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität zu
Köln.
Haspelmath, Martin. 1993. More on the typology of inchoative/causative verb alternations.
In B. Comrie & M. Polinsky (eds.), Causatives and Transitivity (Studies in Language
Companion Series, 23) Amsterdam: Benjamins. 87-120.
Horvath, Julia & Tal Siloni. 2008. Active lexicon: adjectival and verbal passives. In S.
Armon-Lotem, G. Danon, and S. Rothstein (eds.), Current Issues in Generative Hebrew
Linguistics. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 105-134.
Reinhart, Tanya. 2002. The theta system: an overview. Theoretical Linguistics 28: 229-290.
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