The Typology of Nonintegrated Words in Hebrew

Many Hebrew words are unique depending on their foreign etymology as well as on social and psychological variables like substandard registers, children’s game words, and emotional words; they form special word classes in the lexicon. The most common ways for word formation in Modern Hebrew morphology are root and pattern, stem and affix, and two stem combinations. Their inflectional paradigms are very predictable. Other derivational ways – acronym and blends – are rarer and display irregular patterns. In this paper, I postulate nine linguistic features to distinguish between the various Hebrew words, and establish the different layers of the Hebrew lexicon. The findings lead to the discussion concerning the structure of the lexicon and the status of nonintegrated words in Hebrew.