Edited by Sedigheh Moradi, Marcia Haag, Janie Rees-Miller and Andrija Petrovic
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 353] 2021
► pp. 395–414
The trajectory of language shift and attrition in the Israeli immigrant community in the United States represents a complex interaction between Hebrew, a revitalized language of heritage, and English, a language that is highly pervasive in the Israeli urban landscape. The language of the children whose Hebrew is still developing at the onset of contact with English attests to morphological interaction and innovative lexical constructions that are unprecedented in monolingual language development for Hebrew or English. Analysis of longitudinal, narrative, and innovative verb formation data in children’s Hebrew language oral production confirms the vulnerability of derivational morphology and verb formation in Hebrew and the increasing diffusion of English lexical formation devices as proficiency in Hebrew declines.