Working Papers of the Cornell Phonetics Laboratory 2003, v.15, pp. 101-129 Diminutive Reduplication in Modern Hebrew * Rina Kreitman In this paper I explore diminutive reduplication in Modern Hebrew (MH) using an Optimality Theoretic (McCarthy & Prince 1995) framework, which has the advantage of allowing interaction of phonological and morphological constraints regulating the reduplication process. I claim that reduplication in MH stems from general principles of reduplication interacting with principles of fixed prosody. A bisyllabic template with pre- specified vocalic material determines the shape of the diminutive form. The bisyllabic template is motivated through constraint interaction on word size. The infixed reduplicant is responsible for reduplicating the last syllable of the input, example: gezer ‘carrot’ → gzarzar ‘baby carrot’. Trisyllabic output forms: lavan ‘white’ → levanvan ‘whitish’, superficially, do not seem to conform to the bisyllabic template. These arise from phonological constraints on wellformedness of onset clusters. I also account for forms that remain faithful to the input vowel like xazir→ xazarzir. Reduplication can be regarded as a case of affixation, specifically infixation, even in non-concatenative languages. 1. Introduction In Modern Hebrew, reduplication is used for forming diminutive nominal and adjectival forms. This is a productive process, whereby new forms are created using a “template”. In this paper, I show how diminutive reduplication in the nominal and adjectival system follows principles of reduplication interacting with principles governing fixed prosodic word structures. I show that in the nominal and adjectival system, a template with pre-specified vocalic material determines the shape of diminutive reduplicated forms. McCarthy (1981) claims that the process of reduplication involves a specified template composed of consonantal and vocalic slots or moras into which the regular autosegmental material is mapped. “No special rules of reduplication are needed – the phenomenon simply arises when the universal or language particular rules of association yield a one-to-many association between the melody and the template.” (p. 410) * I would like to thank Draga Zec, Amanda Miller-Ochuizen, and Bruce Morén for the fruitful discussions and constructive comments. I would also like to thank Abby Cohn and Wayne Harbert for their help. All mistakes are my own.