At the interface of syntax and prosody: differentiating Left Dislocated and Tripartite Verbless Clauses in Biblical Hebrew

Abstract

The so-called tripartite verbless clause in Biblical Hebrew consists of two nominal phrases and a pronominal element. Three analyses of the pronominal element have been advanced, each with implications for understanding the structure of the sentence. A first approach has been to view the pronominal element as a copular constituent, which serves only to link the two nominal constituents in a predication (Albrecht 1887(Albrecht , 1888Brockelman 1956; and Kummerouw 2013). A second approach has been to view the pronominal element as the resumptive element of a dislocated constituent (Gesenius, Kautzsch and Cowley 1910;Andersen 1970; Zewi 1996Zewi , 1999Zewi , 2000Joüon-Muraoka 2006). A third approach combines the first and second approaches and is represented by the work of Khan (1988Khan ( , 2006 and Holmstedt and Jones (2014). A fourth approach views the pronominal element as a "last resort" syntactic strategy-the pronominal element is a pronominal clitic, which provides agreement features for the subject (Naudé 1990(Naudé , 1993(Naudé , 1994(Naudé , 1999(Naudé , 2002. The pronominal element is obligatory when the nominal predicate is a referring noun phrase-the pronominal clitic is used to prevent ambiguity in the assignment of subject and predicate (see Doron 1986; Borer 1983).As is well-known in the linguistics literature, cross-linguistically left dislocation involves a "gap" at the boundary between the dislocated constituent and the matrix sentence. In spoken

Preface

“…These questions are not trivial, but go to the very foundation of grammatical inquiry. In recent years, Hebrew linguists have become more interested in foundational questions (e.g., Forbes 2009;Miller-Naudé and Naudé 2017). The interest parallels a sea change in general linguistics, largely driven by new challenges from the cognitive linguistic perspective (Geeraerts 2010;Scholz, Pelletier, and Pullum 2011).…”

The intersection of syntax and poetry in the first Hebrew acrostic poem of Lamentations

“…Topicalisation is a normal syntactic configuration involving a non-verbal constituent in initial position in a sentence (see Naudé 1990;Miller-Naudé & Naudé 2019;Miller-Naudé & Naudé 2021). The topicalised constituent may function pragmatically as either the topic of the sentence (i.e., it serves to orient the sentence in terms of information structure) or as the focus of the sentence (i.e., it serves to contrast the constituent with other explicit or implicit alternatives) (see Holmstedt 2009Holmstedt , 2014.…”

“…Left dislocation is a syntactic construction that is distinct from topicalisation in that the left dislocated element occurs outside of the left edge of the sentence boundary and a resumptive element occurs within the matrix sentence (see Naudé 1990;Miller-Naudé & Naudé 2019;Miller-Naudé & Naudé 2021). Left dislocation is thus syntactically distinct from topicalisation, although it is like topicalisation in that it also involves marked word order.…”

Frequency, Analogy, and Suppletion

“…In cases where the matrix sentence is a verbless clause, it is important to distinguish constructions involving left dislocation and those which are tripartite verbless clauses (see Naudé 1994a;Naudé and Miller-Naudé 2017 The pronoun ‫וא(‬ ‫)ה֣‬ as resumptive agrees in person, gender, and number with the dislocated element and semantically conveys contrastive focus. When the predicate rather than the subject of a verbless predication is in contrastive focus, it will be topicalised so that it precedes the pronominal subject; in (20) the prepositional predicate ‫֣יָך‬ ‫נֶ‬ ‫פָ‬ ‫לְ‬ is topicalised: The pronominal element ‫הו‬ ‫א‬ is a 'last resort strategy' to avoid ambiguity in the identification of the nominal subject.…”

“…3 In a future article we consider the kind of intonational breaks between the dislocated constituent and the matrix sentence for each type of left dislocation, insofar as they can be determined in the Masoretic system of accents. For a prosodic account for differentiating left-dislocated and tripartite verbless clauses in Biblical Hebrew, see Naudé and Miller-Naudé (2017). For a prosodic account of the Masoretic accents and a preliminary examination of the intonational break in left dislocation and other constructions exhibiting the syntax-phonology interface, see Pitcher (2020, 241-358).…”