Grammatical generalizations and item-specific listing in Hebrew transitivity alternations

Hebrew transitivity alternations are typically marked by a contrast in verbal template (binyan), raising the question of whether speakers generalize these template alternations through synchronic grammatical mechanisms or rely on stored, idiosyncratic listing. This study presents two nonce verb experiments, production and acceptability judgment, designed to disentangle grammatical generalizations from item-specific listing in the causative alternation. Results show that speakers systematically avoid generating transitive forms in templates that do not occur as transitives in Hebrew, niCCaC and hitCaCeC, indicating that such restrictions are encoded in the grammar. Speakers also demonstrate productive use of the phonological stop-fricative alternation rule (spirantization) in the morphophonological environments tested. Additionally, speakers match the frequency of alternating transitive templates in Hebrew in their production. However, speakers’ choice of specific transitive templates does not reliably follow from the intransitive template, does not align with the distribution of attested alternations, and shows no detectable sensitivity to manner-of-articulation faithfulness. Instead, speakers produce and accept a wide range of template pairings, including rare or unattested combinations. These findings challenge theories that posit systematic morphosyntactic mechanisms for template realization, specifically accounts in which verbal templates are taken to be realizations of a Voice head and the alternating templates to be structurally related through layering. Rather, the results support an account in which alternants are systematically related to each other at the level of argument structure and event semantics, while the morphological realization of each of them is listed independently, alongside a grammatical constraint on the transitivity of niCCaC and hitCaCeC.