Linguistics
Subject: Hebrew psychological verbs and nominalizations
Supervisor: Dr. Ivy Sichel
Abstract: in my thesis I present and analyze the argument and event structure of Hebrew Psych nominals in light of, and with emphasis on the differences between the psychological lexicon of English and the rich Psych lexicon of Hebrew. I claim that this richness is what allows us to isolate meaning ingredients in verbal forms as to obtain a more direct mapping of meaning to form, thereby expanding the current knowledge regarding Psych verbs and their nominalizations. However, in spite of the meaning-form flexibility available in Hebrew, there are nevertheless also inter-language restrictions on the types of psychological nominalizations available in the language, depending on morphological form, i.e. verbal pattern. To show how the language is both restrictive as well as flexible, I focus on semantic contrasts between Psych nominalizations derived from the hif’il and pi’el verbal patterns.