Innovation of Verbs in Hebrew

What it is about

A short paper on how Hebrew makes new verbs. Hebrew words sit in a root-pattern array: several thousand consonant roots cross 100–120 noun patterns, but only seven verb patterns. When a foreign noun has no verb form, speakers apply "squeezing": the vowels are removed from the noun, the remaining consonants become a new root, and that root gets a new row in the array, where a verb can then be built from one of the seven patterns. The paper gives examples (telephone, giving a verb to phone; basis; compile, debug, format, fax, discuss, Pascal, Rentgen), and shows that squeezing also works on Hebrew nouns (mispar, "number", gives a verb to number) and on a two-word idiom. It is a description of a generation procedure; the paper reports no measurements.

Ideas

I1. A squeezing generator for loan verbs: given a loan noun, delete its vowels to get a consonant root, place the root in the array, and fill the seven verb patterns. Output the candidates with a flag "unchecked" for a lexicon entry. This is a deterministic table, not a model.
I2. A test set from the paper: the squeezed verbs it lists (for example le-qampel for compile, le-dabbeg for debug, le-farmet for format, le-faqses for fax) are source-noun-to-verb pairs. Run the generator on the source nouns and measure how many of the listed verbs it reproduces.
I3. Squeezing from phrases: because the procedure also works on two-word idioms, a verb-noun expression can yield a new verb root. Use this as a candidate rule when a Hebrew verb-noun expression has no single verb in the lexicon.

For Mova

I1 goes into languages/he/05b-verb-paradigms.md. I2 is a test for the generator and is documented in languages/he/08-lexicon-register.md under loan words. I3 goes into languages/he/05-verbs.md, next to the verb-noun expressions.

Institutions

🎓Hebrew University of JerusalemJerusalem ·

Israel42 works · 8,354 citations 🎓Technion – Israel Institute of TechnologyHaifa ·

Israel20 works · 3,844 citations

Topics Hebrew & Aramaic Semitic languages

Cite

Cite as Uzzi Ornan. 2014. Innovation of Verbs in Hebrew. Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Social Dynamics and Personal Attributes in Social Media.

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3115/v1/w14-2713

@inproceedings{ornan2014innovation,
  title = {{Innovation of Verbs in Hebrew}},
  author = {Uzzi Ornan},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Social Dynamics and Personal Attributes in Social Media},
  year = {2014},
  doi = {10.3115/v1/w14-2713},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/w14-2713}
}

References

7 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

Bat-El Outi, 1994. Stem Modification and Cluster Transfer in Modern Hebrew. Natural Language and a LinguisticTheory 12, pp. 571-596 find
Bolozky, Shmuel 1978. Word Formation Strategies in the Hebrew Verb System, Denominative Verbs. Afroasiatic Linguistics 5:3 pp. 111-136. McCarthy, John. find
J., 1981. A Prosodic Theory of Nonconcatenative Morphology. Linguistic Inquiry 12. pp. 373-418. find
Ornan, Uzzi. 1976. םישדח םישרוש תריצי לע (on generating new roots). Leshonenu- la-ˁam, Academy of Hebrew Language, Jerusalem, Vol 27, pp 254-267. find
Ornan, Uzzi. 1983. דציכ תירבעה הלימה תרוצת (How do we build a Hebrew word). Bar-Asher et al. (editors), Studies in Hebrew dedicated to Ze`ev Ben-Haiim, Magnes Press, Jerusalem, pp. 13-42. find
Ornan, Uzzi. 1990. Machinery for Hebrew Word Formation, Martin Charles Golumbic (ed), Advances in Artificial Intelligence, Springer-Verlag, pp. 75-93. find
Ornan, Uzzi. 2003. הנורחאה הלימה (The Final Word), University of Haifa pub, pp. 103-126. various new roots are dealt with in Ornan, 2003 pp. 110-116. pattern root psq gmr ḥbr ˁbd prsm ṭlgrp _a_a_ _i__e_ ma__e_ pasaq gamar ḥabar ˁabad - - pisseq gimmer ḥibber ˁibbed pirsem ṭilgrep mapseq - maḥber - - - Figure 1: Part of Root-Pattern Array list of patterns: ma—ati—o-t list of roots: gmr ḥny h'l'k' MAhlAk Figure 2: Illustrating part of the generating algorithm hit_a__e-__a_ ta__u_a hi__i_ hitpasseq - hitḥabber - hitparsem - psaq gmar - - - - — taḥbura - - - hipsiq - - hiˁbid - - phonemic word: actual word: /mahlak/ [mahalax] find

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/ornan-2014-innovation-verbs-hebrew/

📄 Innovation of Verbs in Hebrew