Creativity vs. Meaningfulness in Adverbial Derivation

This paper will discuss the constraints and limitation on the morphological derivation of adverbs from nominal kernels and will examine a growing tendency in Modem Hebrew to create novel adverbs from existing nouns with the addition of the suffix +it. A delicate equilibrium is observed between a fairly wide range of freedom of formation and the criterion of meaningfulness. In order to render such novel adverbs meaningful, at least one of two conditions should be met: (a) the existence of inner cohesive semantic relations in the case of immanent adverbs, or (b) reference to fixed content domains or aspects, or fixed or ad-hoc contrasts in the case of external adverbs. Both ‘frame semantics’ theory as well as ‘relevance theory’ provide a set of constraints on the derivation of adverbs from nominal kernels and explain why some such forms render utterances odd or unacceptable, while others contribute to overall meaningfulness.