Size, allomorphy and guttural-final stems in Modern Hebrew

Abstract There is a tendency for syncretism between future and infinitive stems in Modern Hebrew. Verbs with final orthographic gutturals do not follow this trend in one verbal type. In another, they do follow it, but their exponent is different from that of regular verbs. Previous studies have claimed that (i) gutturals are represented in Modern Hebrew as a vowel /a/ (Faust, Noam. 2005. The fate of gutturals in Modern Hebrew. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University MA Thesis); (ii) Infinitives are derived in two cycles (Faust, Noam & Vered Silber-Varod. 2014. Distributed Morphology and prosody: The case of prepositions. In Burit Melnik (ed.), Proceedings of IATL29 (MITWPL 72), 71–92. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press); and (iii) stems seek to be no shorter than two syllables (e.g. Bat-El, Outi. 2003. The fate of the consonantal root and the binyan in Optimality Theory. Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes 32. 31–60.). Relying on these claims, an analysis is proposed involving two allomorphs with a priority relation. Phonological considerations of multiple correspondence, word size and cyclicity may nevertheless override the effect of priority, leading to the selection of the non-default allomorph. In the last section I briefly discuss two alternatives to the priority relation: the autosegmental alternative and the gradient alternative.