Dissertation - Michael Becker

adjectives and verbs), but rather on apparent morpho-phonological gender: All and onlythe nouns that appear to be feminine by virtue of having a feminine suffix on them take–ot, including masculine nouns that end in -a, such as kolég-a ‘(male) colleague’. I amassuming that some other constraint enforces this pattern, a constraint that categoricallyoutranks both LOCAL(o) and φ-MATCH. I call this constraint µ-MATCH, as shown in (95).(95)fukáÙa FEM + {im MASC , ot FEM } µ-MATCH φ-MATCH LOCAL(o)a. fukáÙ-im *! *b. ☞ fukáÙ-ot *Returning to native masculine nouns now, there is still the problem of selecting –ot forthose ot-takers that don’t have [o] in them, such as Sém ∼ Sem-ót ‘name’. Since neitherLOCAL(o) nor DISTAL(o) can help with selecting –ot in the absence of a root [o], someother mechanism must be involved.I propose that ot-taking can be attributed to a constraint that doesn’t refer to the rootvowel, but rather penalizes some aspect of the –im suffix itself, e.g. *´σ/HIGH, whichpenalizes stressed high vowels (Kenstowicz 1997; de Lacy 2004). A constraint such as*LAB would work equally well – neither constraint is otherwise clearly active in thelanguage 12 .12 Arguably, both constraints are relevant for Hebrew phonology in general: *´σ/HIGH could be used toderive the distribution of stressed vowels in segholates, which only allow non-high stressed vowels, producingalternations like the one in kécev ∼ kicb-í ‘rhythm / rythmic’. Self-conjuction of *LAB could account for therestrictions on the distribution of labials in roots.97