Peculiarities of Formationof Abstract Nouns in Hebrew

Abstract

One of the sources of enriching of Hebrew vocabulary is creating of the new words by already established stems and models of word deriving models in the grammar (including the cases of borrowing from the other languages), though, there are some cases of filling of the vocabulary artificially as well.

Permanent process of renovation of the vocabulary develops in three directions: a) new lexical units are created; b) words useless for the language are moved into the passive vocabulary;

c) number of meanings of the words change; as a result, neologisms and archaisms are created in the language [Kornienko 1979:11].

In Hebrew, great number of neologisms (in particular, nouns) is result of the above morphological

word-formation. Abstract nouns are distinguished with their great number and abstract nouns with ת∙ו – suffixes are even more prominent. Among them, number lexemes formed from internationalisms is especially great.

To determine, why ut – suffix is so productive in formation of neologisms in Hebrew, whether its attachment to a word is of artificial nature or it is logical result of the processes ongoing in the language, we found reasonable to study characteristic features of all models and formation of the abstract nouns. To make logical conclusion, we regard that it is necessary

to study not only Hebrew grammar models, but clarification of their relations in the other Semite languages with the represented material, what would allow to exactly determining morphological and semantic functions of abstract models and affixes in modern Hebrew, taking

into consideration general Semite data.

We regard that these issues would be of interest and significance for those, interested in problems of lexicology and word-formation processes (as in our case) and in addition, with respect of systematization of Hebrew grammar categories, as the issue of such significance is presented only fragmentally in the theoretical literature.