תוארי-פועל בסיומת 'ית' בעברית החדשה

The paper discusses a tendency in modern Hebrew to form new adverbs from nominal bases by adding the suffix -it to nouns. Such forms have existed in Hebrew since Biblical times, but they seem to be becoming more and more popular, especially in spoken Hebrew. They now tend to move on and to penetrate higher registers. It-adverbs modify various types of kernels and may exploit different linguistic elements in the sentence: verbs, participles, infinitives and whole sentences. Thus, the Hebrew adverb theoretit translates the following English usage: Theoretically, I see no reason why..., where it functions as a semi-parenthetical sentence-adverb referring to a known content domain or to a commonly opposing set of alternatives. We found no morphological constraints on forming it-adverbs. However, some of the results are extremely odd - almost unacceptable: Princess D. flirted with her lover telephonically, The officers have arrived at the camp registrarily. Such usage might reflect a fashion, a need to be brief and to avoid connectors, and prevails mainly in military talk. We point to the fact that the abovementioned freedom of formation of it-adverbs, namely, the shifting of noun forms from their natural nominal environment into the realms of modification and adjacency, sometimes reduces the meaningfulness of a sentence and renders it vague and difficult to understand