The Pronoun in Tripartite Verbless Clauses in Biblical Hebrew: Resumption for Left-Dislocation or Pronominal Copula?

Abstract

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.

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

“…The analysis by Holmstedt and Jones (2014) attempted to distinguish tripartite verbless clauses from left dislocated verbless clauses by examining both the syntax and the semantics/pragmatics of the construction within its textual context. The analysis presented here relies upon the vocalisation tradition as preserved by the Masoretic accentual system to differentiate the two constructions rather than upon our ability to discern the semantics or pragmatics of the initial constituent of the construction within the biblical text.…”

“…For example, Holmstedt and Jones (2014) identify some tripartite verbless clauses as left dislocation structures in cases where syntactically there is agreement in number and gender with the resumed element and pragmatically the left dislocated element is the topic in a topic-focus structure. Example (1), for example, they identify as a left dislocation construction: "As for the LORD, he is God."…”

“…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.…”

Copulas, Cleft Sentences and Focus Markers in Biblical Hebrew

“…The parallel between syntax and prosody of the Biblical Hebrew constructions and Aramaic copula constructions can be taken as evidence that the pronoun in such Biblical Hebrew constructions has likewise developed the status of a copula subject index, or has at least advanced towards this status along the grammaticalization pathway. One should be cautious of attempting to distinguish left dislocation constructions from Subject-Predicate constructions on functional grounds, as do Holmstedt and Jones (2014). Left dislocation constructions with coreferential clitics and subject-initial constructions in principle exhibit functional equivalence in Biblical Hebrew (Khan 1988, 95-96).…”