Regularization in the Crystallization of Modern Hebrew: The Case of Counterfactual Conditionals

Abstract:Regularization is a process of linguistic reduction through the elimination of variants. Regularization processes occur naturally during language acquisition and learning. In social situations where learners comprise a large portion of the language community, regularization can lead to linguistic change. This was the case during the development of Modern Hebrew. Therefore, regularization processes are essential to a fundamental question about the crystallization of Modern Hebrew: to what extent its grammar continues the grammar of the previous layers of Hebrew and to what extent it features novel characteristics of its own.This paper focuses on the crystallization of counterfactual conditionals in Modern Hebrew. It shows that this process involved no new linguistic phenomena but only a culling of the large inventory of variants. These variants that coexisted during the revival period were all inherited from the preceding stages of Hebrew. A regularization process, which occurred mainly in the Mandate period, eliminated some variants, such as the positive meaning of ʾilmale and the qatal (regular pasttense) form in the main clause (the consequence). The variants that survived the regularization process underwent differentiation, becoming associated with distinct registers or meanings.