Poetic Patterns and Constituent Order in Biblical Hebrew

This chapter deals with one specific type of existential clauses, namely, existential clauses containing a noun phrase (NP) and a prepositional phrase (PP). In particular, the issue of the relative order of the different constituents of such clauses is addressed. As is well-known from Biblical Hebrew, and as Martin Baasten, and before him Carmignac have remarked for Qumran Hebrew, the prepositional phrase and noun phrase may occur in either order. In certain cases, the prepositional phrase or the noun phrase may even precede the predicator of existence. All of the studies mentioned in the chapter argues that variation in constituent order is often functionally relevant, which justifies the question whether also the opposing orders in existential clauses would have different functions. Keywords: constituent orders; existential clauses; Martin Baasten; Qumran Hebrew

This paper discusses the relationship between constituent order and information structure in main and subordinate clauses in Karitiana, based on data taken from dialogues and a narrative. We show that head-internal relative clauses display an obligatory movement of the head (pivot) to the left edge of the clause paired with a special verb prefix ti- when the extracted argument is the object whereas adverbial subordinates may vary in constituent order without any changes in morphology. A possible source for this object focus morphology is suggested: an object nominalization prefix limited to embedded clauses in Proto-Tupi may have given rise to object relative clauses in Karitiana and spread to clefts and main clause environments, grammaticalizing as an object focus marker. Keywords: Karitiana; constituent order; focus marker; relative clause; cleft

A SECOND LOOK AT DOUBLE PREVERBAL CONSTITUENTS* Nicholas A. Bailey SIL International nicholas_bailey@sil.org A review of Doppelt besetztes Vorfeld: Syntaktische, pragmatische und übersetzungstechnische Studien zum althebräischen Verbalsatz. By Walter Gross. BZAW 305. Pp. xiv + 347. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001. Cloth, € 98.00. $118.17. Walter Gross, known for other works on Biblical Hebrew constituent order,1 has bravely set out to explore some rough terrain: clauses with two (or more) preverbal nominal constituents, especially in poetry, and how translators have handled such clauses. This insightful and richly illustrated work has important implications for the fields of Biblical Hebrew grammar, discourse, and rhetorical structure. To be sure, to appreciate such a work, a significant investment is required on the part of the reader. “Pragmatics” and specifically the subfield of “information structure” are still relatively immature and many notions such as “topic” and “focus,” which Gross employs, are hotly debated among linguists. Still, these fields potentially have much to offer the Hebrew grammarian, exegete, and translator. In fact, an exegete’s job is not truly complete until such meaning has been accounted for. Along these lines, I offer here a critical assessment of Gross’s contribution, pointing to several areas—particularly his definitions and method—where alternative perspectives would help. In assessing Gross, I refer to several current linguistic theories, especially Lambrecht’s (1994), which has, to different degrees, been the basis for Heimerdinger (1999), Shimasaki (2002), and van der Merwe.2 * I wish to thank Nick Lunn and Stephen Levinsohn for their helpful comments on drafts of this article. 1 See especially W. Gross, Die Satzteilfolge im Verbalsatz alttestamentlicher Prosa: Untersucht an den Büchern Dtn, Ri und 2Kön (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1996). 2 K. Lambrecht, Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus, and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1994). See C. H. J. van der Merwe, “Explaining Fronting in Biblical Hebrew,” JNSL 25 (1999): 173–186, and his review of Gross (Die Satzteilfolge) in C. H. J. van der Merwe, “Towards a Better Understanding of Biblical Hebrew Word Order,” JNSL 25 (1999): 277–300. See J.-M. Heimerdinger, Topic, Focus and Foreground in Ancient Hebrew Narratives (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), and a critical review of the same in S. H. Levinsohn, “Review of Topic, Focus and Foreground in Ancient Hebrew Narratives,” JOTT 14 (2002): 126–147. See K. Shimasaki, Focus Structure in Biblical Hebrew (Bethesda, Md.: CDL Press, 2002) and a critical review of the same in R. D. Holmstedt, “Adjusting Our Focus,” HS (2003): 129–138. Neither Heimerdinger nor Shimasaki have exhausted the usefulness of applying Lambrecht’s theory to Hebrew. Hebrew Studies 45 (2004) 254 Review Essay With the exception of some of his technical terms, I have usually translated quotations from Gross into English in order to make his claims more accessible . German spellings, for example, Topik, Fokus, etc., indicate his notions, since they often diverge with other definitions of topic and focus that I mention. 1.¬BOOK SUMMARY Gross’s study concerns finite verbal clauses with multiple preverbal nominal constituents—which I will simply call “preverbals.” Gross describes these nominal constituents as in the Vorfeld “pre-field,” that is, before a finite verb, as opposed to ones in the Hauptfeld “main field,” that is, following a finite verb. Gross presents the following clause schema, which I have slightly modified for the present reader (pp. 5–6). The first preverbal, P1, precedes the second preverbal, P2, (and P3). other sentence conjunctions, particles, and adverbs, e.g., hto, Nkl, hnh P1 P2 (P3) “preverbal constituents 1, 2, and 3” … w Vorfeld “pre-field” (preverbal area) Verb area Hauptfeld “main field” (postverbal area) By preverbal nominal constituents, Gross means any nominal, with or without a preposition. This designation excludes vocatives and constituents in casus pendens (i.e., left-dislocation), as well as conjunctions, particles, and some deictics and adverbials, which can additionally occur preverbally (i.e., before P1). The “verb” area holds the finite verb itself plus any particles (e.g., al or la) or any infinitive absolute of the same root that might accompany it. There are ten chapters in the book. The supplements include...

The order of clause constituents in Slovene is largely guided by functional sentence perspective, while its English counterpart is grammar-based and much less flexible. Therefore the English translation of a Slovene clause often displays a different order of constituents. In poetry, however, the position assigned to an entity, action, or concept within a line of verse contributes to the overall meaning, text pattern, and poetic effect. Accordingly, efforts are made to preserve the same order of participants in translation, which often results in the assignment of a new syntactic role to the participant and the restructuring of the entire clause. This paper discusses the most frequent types of restructuring employed in the English translations of select poems by the contemporary Slovene poet Dane Zajc.

This study investigates clause constructions in Auslan. It looks at the alignment of constituent semantic role with constituent position and order in clauses, changes in the morphology of signs according to position and/or role, and the interpretation of omitted arguments. The aim is to determine if there are grammatical relations in Auslan. The most frequent constituent order parallels English, thus Auslan might be said to also instantiate a basic SVO word order. However, every possible constituent order pattern is also attested without there being other coding and behavioural properties associated with grammatical relations that could explain this flexibility. I conclude that constituent order in Auslan is the result of the interaction of pragmatic and semantic factors, visual representation, and language contact with English, rather than autochthonous grammatical relations. Auslan grammar draws on both so-called gestural and so-called linguistic resources at the clause level, not just at the word (sign) level.

This article explores the influences of information structure (IS) on intonation. It proposes an account whereby a single syntactic representation, which contains formal features such as focus (F), and contrastive topic (CT), is seen by both the phonological and interpretational modules of the grammar. The two aspects of IS that have received the most attention in recent formal work on IS – focus background and topic comment – are given. For each, a sketch of their realization and, more extensively, their interpretation, is offered. The article then addresses the effect of IS on constituent order in various languages. It is shown that IS realization can be thought of as a set of mapping requirements, in addition to those of default prosody, between syntactic structure and prosodic structure, which make reference to the IS representations (e.g. F and CT marking) in the syntax.

Literary Forms/Techniques & Methods of Study Jaime A. Banister, WF Walter A. Vogels, Francis M. Macatangay, and Christopher T. Begg 1442. Edward L. Greenstein, "Fugitive Hero Narrative Pattern in Mesopotamia," Worship, Women, and War, 17-35 [see #2002]. G. proposes his own theory regarding the structure of the "fugitive hero narrative" (FHN) (i.e., someone is exiled or otherwise spends time away from home, often facing danger, and returns home as a hero) motif in ANE texts. According to G., there are fourteen elements to the FHN, though some of these are optional. Extra-biblical examples include Sinuhe (Egypt), Idrimi (North Syria), Hattushili III (Hatti), Esarhaddon (Assyria), and Nabonidus (Babylon); G. focuses on the latter two instances. Biblical passages exemplifying the pattern include Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, and the story of Israel's beginnings (Canaan to Egypt and back to Canaan), though G. notes that the pattern is also found in a more limited form in a few other biblical passages (i.e., the stories of Hagar, Gideon, Jephthah, Absalom, Jeroboam ben Nabat, Hadad the Edomite, and Joash).—J.A.B. 1443. Marie-Françoise Maincent-Hanquez, "La Bible et les femmes: Les Américaines aux avant-postes de la théologie féministe," MScRel 73 (2016) 93-110. The New World where the Pilgrim Fathers settled granted the Bible a special status from the very beginning. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the first American woman to publish a critical book on the Bible entitled The Woman's Bible (1895–1898). Since then, in the United States, feminist theologians have continued to analyze and discuss the biblical material. Their theological reflections inspired women far beyond America. Still women's contexts and experiences have become so diversified that the fundamental original premises of feminist theology have been challenged from the side of multiple, evolutive, extended, and sometimes contradictory theological tendencies. However, rather than being seen as signs of weakness, these developments should be welcomed as proofs of feminism's ongoing vitality and energy. [Adapted from published abstract—W.V.] 1444. Saul M. Olyan, "Ritual Inversion in Biblical Representations of Punitive Rites," Worship, Women, and War, 135-43 [see #2002]. O. investigates three major motifs of ritual inversion in their relation to punitive rites in the Hebrew Bible. The first motif involves exhumation and how this treats human remains in a manner designed to reverse the funeral or burial rites which preserved the body. The second motif is that of imposing upon one's enemy humiliating depilation that if it were voluntarily done to oneself would be viewed as acts of mourning and/or humility. The third motif of ritual inversion is that of forcing Nazirites to break their vows by making them drink wine.—J.A.B. [End Page 480] 1445. Frank H. Polak, "Whodunit? Implicit Subject, Discourse Structure, and Pragmatics in the Hebrew and Greek Bibles," From Author to Copyist, 223-47 [see #2021]. P. discusses the phenomenon of the implicit subject of the given verb in the Hebrew Bible. The mention or non-mention of the subject in such biblical narratives as 2 Sam 13:24-27; Gen 25:29-34; 1 Kgs 21:4-7; Judg 3:20-25; and 2 Sam 2:20-23 is related to such literary phenomena as highlighting, discourse structure, the pragmatics of the action sequence and the presentation of the character (i.e., that character's success or failure in the spoken interaction and the way a character views him/herself). In other versions, such as in the DSS and the LXX, there is a preference for clarity over the pragmatics of the Hebrew text.—F.M.M. 1446. Matthieu Richelle, "Des yeux pour voir, des oreilles pour entendre … Comparison entre un motif biblique et un formule mésopotamienne," ZAW 124 (2012) 103-6. R.'s note compares the motif of blindness and deafness in biblical texts (esp. Isaiah) with an Akkadian formula that appears in Assyrian prayers and Babylonian oracles. [Adapted from published abstract—C.T.B.] 1447. Nili Shupak, "Weighing in the Scales: How an Egyptian Concept Made its Way into Biblical and Postbiblical Literature," From Author...

This study presents a fresh approach to the lineation of Biblical Hebrew poems by exploring the poetic line as a perceivable unit of structure that potentially emerges in the cognitive experience of reading or hearing a poem. Drawing from the cognitive poetics work of Reuven Tsur, it applies two cognitive constraints on versification—short-term memory and Gestalt principles—to the Biblical Hebrew poetic line. It accounts for the emergence of poetic lines in the performance experience as a dynamic mental process in which segments of text emerge as parts and wholes in relation to one another. This process is constrained not only by cognitive processing limitations but also by the combinational potential of elements of the text from all levels of language, as well as by reader/listener cooperation and expectations. This paper illustrates, in the context of David's lament for Saul and Jonathan, how a cognitive poetics perception-oriented approach can provide tools (though not rules) for lineating Biblical Hebrew poems. The value of this approach for interpretation is demonstrated in a brief discussion of the chiastic macrostructure that emerges from the lineation of David's lament.

This paper presents the implementation part of my doctoral research at the University of Cambridge. It provides a description of the Information Structure Transfer (IST), a machine translation prototype designed within the framework of the Spoken Language Translator (SLT by SRI, Cambridge/Palo Alto) and based on the Core Language Engine ([1]). The IST includes two discourse-processing modules: the pre-transfer Information Structure Activator (ISA) and the post-transfer Information Structure Generator (ISG). The IST prototype calculates and processes vital features of information structure explored in context of structural differences between positional and nonpositional languages. It offers algorithmic solutions and an implementation framework for local discourse processing in machine translation. Under scrutiny is a web of interrelated factors such as pronominalization, anaphora resolution, zero anaphors, definiteness and constituent order.

Abstract: The principle of end-weight (Quirk et al. 1985) posits that language users prefer to place short ("light") before long ("heavy") constituents because this is easier to cognitively process (Hawkins 1994). Weight effects on constituent order have been discussed for well over a century in languages like English and German (cf. Behaghel 1909, 1930). In Slavic languages, however, they have received little attention so far (cf. Kizach 2012: 251). Rather, the focus has been on information structure (Short 2002: 494). However, Goldberg's Tenet #5 predicts that general cognitive restraints such as weight effects apply across languages (Goldberg 2003: 219). This article presents the results of a pilot study that investigates a phenomenon known as Heavy NP Shift, in which the VP[NP PP] pattern changes to VP[PP NP] when the NP is heavier than the PP. Employing the Magnitude Estimation Test method (Hoffmann 2013), grammaticality acceptability ratings from 39 L1 Slovak speakers were elicited. The results show that Slovak is susceptible to weight effects, such that placing short before long constituents is always preferred. Moreover, the results provide evidence for the existence of a VP[V NP PP] pattern in Slovak that has been identified as "basic" for English (Hawkins 1994: 20). This supports Hawkins's (2004) Performance-Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis, which posits that grammaticalized patterns in analytic languages are the result of performance preference and therefore preferred in synthetic languages.

[Extract] Languages of different typological profiles are known to employ a wide array of morphosyntactic devices to encode information structure (thus supporting Rizzi 1997). In languages with flexible, or discourse-dependent, order of clausal constituents, linear position in a sentence or clause often correlates with marking topic or focus (cf. Pereltsvaig 2004). Alternative grammatical means encoding information structure may include particles encoding focus or topic, as in Urarina, an isolate from Peru (Olawsky 2006; also see cross-linguistic discussion in Lambrecht 1994), specialized marking on verbs (e.g. focus systems in Western Austronesian languages: see Dixon and Aikhenvald 1997 for a brief survey), or dedicated person marking such as proximal-obviative in Algonquian languages (e.g., lunker 2004; also see Frascarelli 2000). Valency-changing or valency-manipulating devices, such as applicatives, may have an additional pragmatic function, casting highly topical participants as core arguments (see Mithun 2001, for a general perspective). North Arawak languages of adjacent areas of Brazil, Venezuela and Colombia employ different sets of personal cross-referencing prefixes for grammatical marking of information structure (see Aikhenvald 1995, on Baniwa of Icana, and Bare; Aikhenvald 1998 on Warekena of Xie). Tariana, a North Arawak language closely related to Baniwa of lcana, is rather unusual for the Arawak family in that it employs cases on noun phrases as a major means for encoding topical and focal constituents. This is in addition to a plethora of other grammatical means including clausal constituent order, an applicative-like verbal derivation and placement of enclitics. In this paper I investigate the grammatical means for encoding pragmatic notions in Tariana, and outline the dynamics of their development in the situation of intensive language contact with genetically unrelated Tucanoan languages, and the increasingly dominant Portuguese, the local lingua franca. Tariana is the only Arawak language spoken in the multilingual area of the Vaupes River Basin. Its position, and the role of contact-induced change in its history, are addressed in §2. I then turn to a brief analysis of grammatical means encoding pragmatic notions in the Traditional Tariana (§3). This is accompanied by a comparison with similar patterns in Tucanoan languages. Intensive diffusion of patterns between Tariana and other languages of the area has brought about a plethora of changes in the ways of information structure is marked in the language of innovative speakers (§§4-5). The last section (§6) contains a summary.

This thesis is a reference grammar of the Eibela language, also referred to as Aimele (Ethnologue code: AIL). Eibela has approximately 300 speakers living primarily in Lake Campbell, Western Province, Papua New Guinea. The majority of the data for this thesis was gathered in Lake Campbell, with some addition research taking place in Wawoi Falls, Western Province. In Lake Campbell, Eibela is the dominant language of the community, and is the language of day-to-day life. English and Tok Pisin are becoming more prominent as languages of commerce, and are preferred for written communication. Most members of the Lake Campbell community are also adept at speaking the languages of the surrounding communities.

Recent studies on Norwegian, German, and English show that the ordering of constituents in transitive sentences depends on their animacy, definiteness, pronominalization and length. It has further been suggested that these properties can be used to predict grammatical functions of NPs. We examine whether these properties play the same role in Russian, a language with a rather free word order and a rich morphologically-marked case system.In a corpus-based study, we analyzed 300 SVO and 300 OVS sentences taken from a novel and a newspaper. The results suggest that animacy and pronominalization can be used to predict the position of constituents, but not their grammatical functions. When the pre-verbal position coincided with the subject position (SVO), the probability of animate NP to be the subject was the same as its probability to be initialized. Pronominalization was a reliable indicator of subjecthood in SVO sentences but a strong predictor of objecthood in OVS sentences. Thus, when case-marking distinguishes between grammatical functions, word order primarily indicates information structure allowing marked constituents in a marked OVS order. This is not taken into account by approaches that use such properties for the disambiguation of grammatical functions.

This issue presents a collection of papers that address the interactions between discourse structure and information structure from a variety of perspectives. Their common goal is to improve our understanding of how utterance-internal semantic devices that make up information structure, and utterance-external semantic devices that make up discourse structure, interact to refer to and update a dynamically evolving representation of discourse context. The papers collected in this issue have evolved from presentations at the Workshop on Information Structure, Discourse Structure and Discourse Semantics during the 13th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) in Helsinki, August 2001. The workshop set as its goal to bring together researchers interested in the interactions between discourse structure and informa-

The Bardi language of Northwestern Australia exhibits complex interactions between morphology, syntax, and discourse structure. In this paper I examine the interplay between constituent order, the marking of argument functions through verbal agreement, and the role of bound nominal omission. The findings presented here have implications for the Pronominal Argument Hypothesis and analysis of bound argument markers as “pronominal”.