Canaan Breiss, Linguistics & Languages

English Loan Verbs in Hebrew

This presentation looks at English verbs borrowed into Modern Hebrew, and explores various aspects of their integration into the Hebrew verbal system. Hebrew's system of verbal morphology, like other Semitic languages, is based on two discontinuous units: the lexical triconsonantal root and the inflectional melody. This system of porphology stands in contrast to the concatenative morphoology of English, which is based on a contiguous verbal stem. In my thesis I examined the factors influencing how verbs are borrowed from English into Hebrew, and looked at some implications of my analysis for the larger field of loan-word linguistics.