No abstract

The relationship between syntax and information structure is an increasingly popular subject of research within Biblical Hebrew studies. However, there exist two asymmetries within current approaches taken as a whole: first, the only theoretical linguistic frameworks employed are situated somewhere within the functional approach to linguistics (in contrast with formal, and specifically, generative approaches); second, a Verb-Subject typological classification for Biblical Hebrew is assumed without empirical justification. Yet, the relationship between syntax and semantics, on the one hand, and pragmatics, on the other, is primarily unidirectional; in other words, pragmatics necessarily accesses the syntactic and semantic features of a text, but not vice versa. It stands to reason, then, that any model of information structure can only be as accurate as the syntactic and semantic model upon which it builds. This study presents a typological and generative linguistic analysis of the data in Ruth and Jonah, an Subject-Verb classificiation for Biblical Hebrew and an Subject-Verb based model of information structure.

The status of the third person pronoun as a third element in verbless clauses has been a much studied issue in the history of biblical Hebrew syntax. As with most intriguing grammatical phenomena, scholarly opinion on this issue has shifted considerably over the last century or more. While the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed adherents to both copular and noncopular analyses for the 'pleonastic' pronoun in the so-called tripartite verbless clause, the second half of the twentieth century saw a consensus emerge, influenced particularly by the arguments of eminent scholars like Muraoka and Goldenberg: there was no pronominal copula in biblical Hebrew. In this paper we argue that this position does not adequately account for the data from linguistic typology or comparative Semitics and does not reflect a sensitive reading of the discourse context of many biblical examples.

Although many Hebraists have departed from the traditional understanding of tyvarb in Gen i 1 as an independent phrase with grammatical reference to "THE beginning," it is a view that continues to thrive, and is reflected by the majority of modern translations. Even advocates of the dependent phrase position (e.g., "when God began") struggle with a precise and compelling linguistic analysis. In this article I offer a linguistic argument that will both provide a simpler analysis of the grammar of Gen i 1 and make it clear that the traditional understanding of a reference to an 'absolute beginning' cannot be derived from the grammar of the verse. Instead, the syntax of the verse, based on well-attested features within biblical Hebrew grammar, dictates that there were potentially multiple tyvar periods or stages to God's creative work.

Michael O’Connor (whose 1980 opus, Hebrew Verse Structure, provides a compelling linguistically grounded description of the poetic line) has called the endurance of Lowthian parallelism a “horror” that wreaks havoc on lexical semantics and “is beyond the comprehension of any sensitive student of language.” Why does a model known to be a descriptive failure for a century persist in teaching resources and commentaries? It is because nothing compelling has risen to replace it. O’Connor’s linguistic analysis of the line offered the first piece to replacing the traditional model, but O’Connor’s model was more compelling for the structure of the poetic line than for the relationship of lines. In this study I take up interlineal syntax and offer an analysis that compliments and completes O’Connor’s approach, allowing us to provide a proper burial for the admirable but ultimately unworkable Lowthian parallelism.