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Part of
All Things Morphology: Its independence and its interfaces
Edited by Sedigheh Moradi, Marcia Haag, Janie Rees-Miller and Andrija Petrovic
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 353] 2021
► pp. 395–414

Chapter 21
Trajectory of children’s verb formation in Hebrew as a heritage language

| Stony Brook University

The trajectory of language shift and attrition in the Israeli immigrant community in the United States represents a complex interaction between Hebrew, a revitalized language of heritage, and English, a language that is highly pervasive in the Israeli urban landscape. The language of the children whose Hebrew is still developing at the onset of contact with English attests to morphological interaction and innovative lexical constructions that are unprecedented in monolingual language development for Hebrew or English. Analysis of longitudinal, narrative, and innovative verb formation data in children’s Hebrew language oral production confirms the vulnerability of derivational morphology and verb formation in Hebrew and the increasing diffusion of English lexical formation devices as proficiency in Hebrew declines.

Keywords: language attrition, Hebrew as a heritage language, verb formation, derivational morphology, lexical innovations
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Hebrew as a heritage language
  • 3.The impact of the English language in Israel
  • 4.Israelis in the United States: Dual allegiance to Hebrew and English
  • 5.Maintaining the heritage language: A challenging endeavor
  • 6.Attrition of the heritage language: Focus on Hebrew verb formation
  • 7.Oral narrative data
  • 8.Innovative denominal verb production
  • 9.Longitudinal data: Emergence of innovative blends and an idiosyncratic verb form
  • 10.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 25 August 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.353.21kau
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