Personal names in Modern Hebrew: A morphosyntactic and gender analysis

The article presents a morphosyntactic analysis of personal names in Modern Hebrew, with emphasis on gender characteristics. In fact, Hebrew uses existing words for personal names, and we would expect grammatical rules to apply to names in the same manner as they apply to other words. Almost all words in the language are gender distinguished, meaning that they must be either masculine or feminine, with no neuter form, and full syntactic agreement for gender is required. While masculine words are unmarked, feminine nouns, adjectives, and participles are marked by the suffixes -a or -(V)t. Verbs and inflected prepositions present a gender differentiation as well. However, although personal names originate from these parts of speech or a combination thereof, it appears that they are not subject to all grammatical rules. Semantic differentiations for gender that were used once are now no longer evident. The most salient finding of the present study is that the new trend for personal names is to use less diversification regarding parts of speech. It mostly uses masculine nouns for both sexes, without gender markers or formal syntactic agreement. Consequently, morphosyntactic differentiations tend to disappear, turning masculine nouns into generic names and implying a process of masculinization.