Grammatical representation of animacy in Modern Hebrew

Modern Hebrew is not generally considered a language with regular grammatical expression of the category of animacy. Usually, only question words or demonstrative pronouns are used to exemplify the animacy state of nouns. However, there is more data for it.

First, relative adjectives defining nationalities, membership and different qualities, have a variation in their inflextion paradigms. Adjectives have four basic forms in Hebrew, that is singular or plural and masculine or feminine. When used to describe people, a certain type of suffixes is used in the sg.f and pl.m forms (and these forms can easily be substantivated), whereas when speaking about inanimate nouns, the adjectives use other suffixes. Data from the Internet, which indirectly represents spoken language, especially orthography, reveals that sometimes the affixes used to describe people are used with ‘live’ objects on the whole, and beyond that. I claim that this phenomenon is a representation of the category of animacy in Modern Hebrew.

Secondly, there is a derivational nominal pattern CvC(C)áC famous for its inconstancy when speaking of plural construct state form: sometimes the vowel a is reduced, and sometimes not (this variation can not be explained by any undergoing phonetic process): the vowel a usually persists when the word is a profession name or a quality of a human being, but in case of inanimate objects it is typical to see reduction of the vowel. Here, I suggest that the phenomena represents grammatical humanness rather than animacy.

In the conclusion, an animacy scale, based on the material of the article, is made up. Not surprisingly it turns out to be quite the same as some famous typological animacy scales.