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The emergence of the trochaic foot in Hebrew hypocoristics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2005

Outi Bat-El
Outi Bat-El
Affiliation:
Tel-Aviv University
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Abstract

The paper provides an optimality-theoretic analysis of the prosodic structure and stress patterns in templatic and non-templatic hypocoristics in Hebrew. It is designed to illustrate the emergence of the trochaic foot, whose role elsewhere in the language is rather limited. The trochaic foot has been shown to determine the structure of templatic hypocoristics in various languages; this is also true in Hebrew. In addition, it plays a major role in Hebrew non-templatic hypocoristics, which on the surface look like simple constructions of base+suffix. The trochaic foot does not delimit the number of syllables in non-templatic hypocoristics, but it plays an important role in the stress system, where the position of stress is also sensitive to the input stress and the type of suffix.

Type
Research Article
Information
Phonology , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , August 2005 , pp. 115 - 143
Copyright
2005 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Although I am alone responsible for the content of this paper, many thanks are due to those who provided comments and suggestions: Michael Becker, Dafna Graf, Adam Ussishkin, my students in the Linguistics Department at Tel-Aviv University and the participants of the 20th Meeting of the Israeli Association of Theoretical Linguistics. Special thanks to the three anonymous reviewers, who addressed their critical comments with a supportive attitude. I started working on this paper during my sabbatical at the Linguistics Department of UC Santa Cruz, whose members provided an enjoyable and fruitful atmosphere.