Conservation or change? Exploring trends in Modern Hebrew in light of new spoken corpora of the first two generations of speakers

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents a diachronic study of Modern Hebrew agreement between numerals and their quantified nouns. This research is possible thanks to the discovery of two rare collections of recordings from the 1950s and 1960s, which document four generations of speakers and have become important sources of spoken Early Modern Hebrew. On the basis of these two corpora, I compare numeral agreement in the first two generations of speakers with present-day usage and analyze trends of change and conversation in Modern Hebrew. The study shows that the first generation of speakers (“Gen1”) largely acquired the gender distinction of cardinals. However, in contrast to other agreement issues that educated Gen1 speakers realized fully, numeral use showed variation and absence of agreement in a small set of cases. Moreover, some linguistic features of Gen1 Hebrew found in this study no longer characterize Present-Day Hebrew; among these features is prosodic conditioning, which led to a Gen1 tendency to use the feminine form of the numeral ‘four’ with masculine nouns more frequently than was the case with other numerals.