Colloquial Hebrew imperatives revisited

In revisiting Bolozky's [Bolozky, Shmuel, 1979. On the new imperative in colloquial Hebrew. Hebrew Annual Review 3, 17-24] and Bat-El's [Bat-El, Outi, 2002. True truncation in colloquial Hebrew imperatives. Language 78(4), 651-683] analyses of colloquial Hebrew imperatives, the article argues for restricting Imperative Truncation to the morphologically-triggered process of #tV prefix elision (or even to just #t prefixes). Elision of e and i in imperatives is claimed to be effected by the general, phonetically-motivated elision of the same vowels in casual speech. The prominence and sonority of the vowel a protects it from elision in imperatives, and short forms like kum 'get up!' are not derived from their takum counterparts, but rather borrowed from the normative register.