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# Exponence, allomorphy and haplology in the number and State morphology of Modern Hebrew

**Authors:** [Noam Faust](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/noam-faust/) · **Year:** 2018 · **Venue:** Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3(1) **Link:** [glossa-journal.org/article/id/5016](https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/5016/) · library `lingbulk-2018-faust-exponence-allomorphy-haplology-number-state` · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

[**6** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2800316827) openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14[**1** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/lingbulk-2018-faust-exponence-allomorphy-haplology-number-state/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Glossa: a journal of general linguistics](https://openalex.org/S4210226983)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.228)
- [PDF](https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/5016/galley/12117/download)
- [DOI 10.5334/gjgl.228](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.228)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2800316827)

**Authors (1)**

1. [Faust, Noam](https://openalex.org/A5082214951) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8155-5136) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/65977277) · h 12 · 628 citations · 146 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex-snapshot (2026-10-14); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

Faust asks why plural marking in Modern Hebrew behaves as it does. The masculine plural is -im in the Free State but -ej in the Construct State; the feminine plural is -ot in both States, and the feminine singular -a has a Construct form -at. He writes these regularities as Distributed Morphology Vocabulary Items. Two cases of double plural marking appear on feminine nouns but not on the parallel masculine ones: possessed plurals (sus-ot-ej-xem 'your mares' against *sus-ej-ej-xem for the masculine) and new dual nouns (sus-ot-áim). His account is that the masculine exponents become near-identical adjacent suffixes, so an OCP-type haplology deletes one at Spell-Out, while the feminine -ot and -ej are dissimilar and both survive. The paper is a formal analysis of example paradigms; it reports no counts or measurements.

## Ideas

- I1. Store the plural exponents as an explicit table keyed by (gender, State, possessed or not), not as string rules, so that a lexicon or a segmenter reads the same table: masculine Free -im, masculine Construct -ej, feminine -ot in both States, feminine Construct -at.
- I2. Haplology as a deterministic repair with a test: when two adjacent suffixes are identical or nearly identical, drop one before the surface form. The three forms sus-ej-xem (kept single), *sus-ej-ej-xem (blocked) and sus-ot-ej-xem (kept double) make a small gold set that a rule must pass and that goes red if the rule is wrong.
- I3. Treat the final /t/ of Construct -at as a floating segment linked to an empty final slot, not as part of the suffix. A segmenter that splits a Construct feminine form should record it this way, so the lemma of the Free form is recovered.

## For Mova

I1 and I3 go into [Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/he/04-nouns-adjectives-pronouns/) (noun plurals and the Construct State). I2 is a test set for the same chapter: the three forms above with the expected analysis; the rule itself is a repair step in the Hebrew noun morphology.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.5334/gjgl.228](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.228)

```
@article{faust2018exponence,
  title = {{Exponence, allomorphy and haplology in the number and State morphology of Modern Hebrew}},
  author = {Faust, Noam},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.228},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.228}
}
```

- [← previous The acquisition of Hebrew idioms: Stages, internal composition, and implications for storage](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lingbulk-2018-fadlon-acquisition-hebrew-idioms-stages-internal/)
- [next → The head the construct: Construct state nominals as a novel window to syntactic movement difficulties in hearing impairment](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lingbulk-2018-friedmann-head-construct-construct-state-nominals/)
- [↑ back to Modern Hebrew](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/he/)

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41. Submitted: 13 August 2016 [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Submitted%3A+13+August+2016)
42. Accepted: 30 January 2018 [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Accepted%3A+30+January+2018)
43. Copyright: © 2018 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS [↗](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)