Hebrew verbal passives in Later Language Development: the interface of register and verb morphology

Abstract

The current study examined the production of Hebrew verbal passives across adolescence as mediated by linguistic register and verb morphology. Participants aged eight to sixteen years and a group of adults were asked to change written active-voice sentences into corresponding passive-voice forms, divided by verb register (neutral and high), binyan pattern (Qal / Nif'al, Hif'il / Huf'al, and Pi'el / Pu'al), and verb tense (past and future tense). Results showed that Hebrew passive morphology is a very late acquisition, almost a decade later than in other languages, that passivizing neutral-register verbs was less challenging than high-register verbs, and that past tense verbs were easier to passivize than future tense verbs. An order of acquisition was determined among the three binyan pairs. The paper provides an account of these findings grounded in the event-telling role of Hebrew passives in discourse and the spurt of abstract, lexically specific vocabulary in Later Language Development.

Input–output relations in Hebrew verb acquisition at the morpho-lexical interface

“…Root-and-pattern structure also serves the inflectional expression of verb temporality, as each binyan conjugation actually consists of a set of unique temporal patterns . Table 1 presents the binyan-specific temporal patterns of the five non-passive binyan conjugations (as verbal passive is a very late acquisition in Hebrew and thus not relevant here; see Ravid & Vered, 2017). For example, lamad, lomed, and li-lmod serve as the respective morphological forms of past tense, present tense, and infinitive forms of Qal; while nilmad and yi-lamed denote the respective past and future tense forms of Nif'al.…”

Cognitive and linguistic biases in morphology learning

“…Root and pattern morphology is a type of nonconcatenative morphology found in Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. This type of morphological patterning is less common among languages in the world, and appears to be more difficult for children to learn (Macwhinney, 1978;Ravid & Vered, 2017;Slobin, 1973). In a series of experiments, Finley and Newport (2018b) demonstrated that English speaking adult and child learners are able to learn root and pattern, nonconcatenative morphology when there are a large number of vowel patterns, but fewer consonantal roots.…”

“…Marked morphological patterns, which are those that are irregular, semantically complex, and phonologically complex, tend to be less frequent than "unmarked" morphological patterns (Haspelmath, 2006). Semantic complexity, phonological regularity, perceptual salience, morphological complexity, and morphological regularity, all affect the learnability of morphology (Harmon & Kapatsinski, 2017;Kelly, Wigglesworth, Nordlinger, & Blythe, 2014;Ravid & Vered, 2017). Morphological complexity can contribute to frequency, and therefore "override" complexity (Kelly et al, 2014;Xanthos et al, 2011).…”

“…Morphology learning is a long process. Earliest evidence of morphological competence starts in infancy, as infants begin the process of morpheme segmentation (Mintz, ), but continues through adolescence for the most complex inflectional patterns (Ravid & Vered, ). This review explores the cognitive and linguistic biases that shape the learnability of morphological systems across languages of the world.…”

He was run-over by a bus: Passive – but not pseudo-passive – sentences are rated as more acceptable when the subject is highly affected. New data from Hebrew, and a meta-analytic synthesis across English, Balinese, Hebrew, Indonesian and Mandarin

“…The passive form is created by using a root with one of the passive binyanim. Thus, in the past tense, the active/ passive forms of the example roots above (from Ravid & Vered, 2017, p. 1315 are lamad/ nilmad ('learned/was learned'), hisbir/husbar ('explained/was explained') and tipel/tupal ('took care of/was taken care of'). This morphological system is semi-productive, and some roots may be coerced into nonstandard binyanim for special discourse-pragmatic effects (or erroneously by children; adultlike command of the system is achieved only by adolescence; Ravid & Saban, 2008).…”