Hebrew stress: Back to the future

Abstract

The paper addresses historical changes in the stress system of Hebrew, attending to the difference between Biblical Hebrew (script-based) and contemporary Hebrew (attested), and predicting the system of post-Hebrew; on the basis of experimental evidence and words from the periphery of the lexicon, it is predicted that the stress system of post-Hebrew will be similar to that of Biblical Hebrew. The predicted change from contemporary Hebrew to post-Hebrew is attributed to a combination of two factors: the inconsistency of the present system, and its incompliance with universal principles. The changes are addressed in terms of constraint reranking within the framework of Optimality Theory.