The historical evolution of languages has been more than once influenced by the sheer influence of scholars who re-channeled some linguistic phenomena or simply consecrated aspects of colloquial ...usage. This happened in the history of Romanian language when the Latinist scholars cleansed the lexicon and parts of morphology of various non-Latin borrowings and derivations whereas they revived or inserted Latin formations. Taking account of this, it would be hard to justify the rejection of many feminized denominations of professions used already by people in everyday conversations. With the advance of technology and with the support of the third wave of feminism women are able nowadays to embrace whatever professional field they may want. On the other hand, there are numerous international conventions that acknowledge the role played by women in the setting up of the postindustrial society. That is why my article is a plea in favor of a linguistic updating, namely the acceptance into the literary language of feminized denominations of professions.
The feminine suffixes
-at
,
-et
,
-it
,
-ut
,
-ot
of Modern Hebrew are regularly treated as morphologically simplex. In this paper, I argue for the decomposition of
-it
and
-ut
into
-i-t
and
-u-t
on ...the basis of semantic, phonological and morphological evidence. The paper has two parts. In the first part, the data and the main claims are presented. The feminine suffix is defined as
-t
. The distribution and function of
-i-
and
-u-
in the feminine suffixes are defined, and both
-i-
and
-u-
are shown to carry similar functions elsewhere in the language, without the feminine
-t
. A novel analysis of the plural analysis is also presented. The second part is an application to the data of Lowenstamm’s (Derivational affixes as roots (phasal spellout meets English stress shift). Ms., LLF,
2010
, to appear) specific view of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz in The view from building 20, pp. 111–176. MIT Press, Cambridge,
1993
). Through this formal analysis,
-i-
is shown to be a structurally expletive morpheme. The morpheme
-u-
is analyzed as its -concrete alternant. The latter is shown to appear in both concatenative and non-concatenative suffixes, thus illustrating an understudied possible consequence of the non-concatenative nature of Semitic morphology. The framework adopted—the version of Distributed Morphology in Lowenstamm (Roots, Oxford University Publishing, to appear)—receives support in the success of the analysis.
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