The Development of the qiṭṭūl Noun Pattern in Biblical Hebrew

Abstract

The Hebrew language, like the rest of the Semitic languages, constructs noun and verb stems out of two bound morphemes, namely, the root and an affixed pattern of vowels, sometimes with a preformative or postformative consonant. The vowel patterns are always function morphemes, as they, at the very least, determine the part of speech of the stem. In many cases, however, they serve additionally as content morphemes, providing additional semantic content to the stem