Strategies of Modern Hebrew Verb Formation

Reinvestigation of Modern Hebrew verb formation strategies suggests that assignment of recent as well as potential innovations to canonical morphological forms in the verb system is essentially semantic, and is based on the notions "causation," "agency" and "activity." It is claimed that the basic division is not between transitive and intransitive verbs, but rather into agentive and nonagentive ones, the latter being normally realized in hit pa 'el. Causative agentives tend to be assigned to hif'il, noncausative agentives to pi'el (which may also allow causatives with nonactive patients). The great productivity of pi 'el, which is often attributed to its phonological elasticity, is also due in part to its allowing transitive as well as intransitive noncausative agentives, the natural semantic category for denominative verbs. The three semantic notions are integrated into a 'control' continuum the like of which may be found in other languages.