A Linguistic Theoretical Base for Studying David Fogel's Prose

David Fogel was a Hebrew author of the 1920s whose strong linguistic intuition, together with his real need to fill in what was lacking in Hebrew at a time when the language was being renewed and spoken once again, led him to create mostly innovative formations, all of them based on usual Hebrew patterns. This paper details Fogel's extraction of nuances of meaning from a selected definite formation. We argue that each innovative, or simply unusual and therefore unexpected, word formation was created to produce a new subtle nuance of meaning. For instance, the aspectual adverb [inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="01i" /] made it possible for Fogel to modify merely locative verbs, while causing the other known aspectual adverbs of its syntactic-semantic set to be changed in meaning. The well-known mishnaic adverb [inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="02i" /] emphasizes a sharp emotional situation to be changed immediately. This semantic differentiation could be achieved because [inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="03i" /] [inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="04i" /], and others all belong to a set of aspectual adverbs which can be semantically differentiated. This paper utilizes three devices to reveal the new nuances for which Fogel uses word-formation, namely, the lexical semantics approach, the structural linguistic approach, and the "word-formation—meaning model." Several ways which Fogel employs definite forms to convey new meaning in Married Life are pointed out.