ON THE VISIBILITY OF WORD-INTERNAL MORPHOLOGICAL FEATURES

In this paper I argue that word-internal morphological features can be visible. I present a case from Hebrew, where plural formation of femi nine diminutive nouns is blocked due to features associated with an in ternal suffix. The feminine diminutive form yaldonet 'little girl' con sists of a base yeled 'boy', a diminutive suffix -on, and a feminine s uffix -et; -on is specified for [-Fem] and -et for [+Fem]. The plural suffixes in Hebrew are subcategorized for gender, -ot for [+Fem] and - im for [-Fem]. I argue that diminutive forms such as yaldonet cannot b e pluralized because -im conflicts with the gender of -et, and -ot wit h the gender of -on. While the conflict with -et is expectable, the on e with -on can be explained only if the gender of the internal suffix is visible. There are, however, cases where word-internal suffixes are not visible. These suffixes, unlike the visible suffix -on, are nonco mpositional. I thus propose to view words as consisting of composition al and noncompositional morphological domains; only suffixes in a comp ositional domain can be visible word-internally.