The Scope of the Negative Loʾ in Biblical Hebrew (review)

Abstract

Hebrew Studies 48 (2007) 362 Reviews the term corpus, he does not overtly state a commitment to a corpus linguistics approach to Hebrew Text. However, his approach does offer a corpus of “finite size” for “sampling and representativeness” which comprises texts that might be termed “standard reference.” Should these texts be compiled into “machine readable form,” the basic requirements for a corpus linguistics approach would be in place. In this regard, it is claimed that a well-chosen corpus “provides a yardstick by which successive studies can be measured…new results can be directly compared with already published results without need for recomputation” (see http://bowlandfiles.lancs.ac.uk /monkey/ihe/linguistics/contents.htm ). Elizabeth R. Hayes Wolfson College, Oxford Oxford, England erussell.hayes@gmail.com THE SCOPE OF THE NEGATIVE LO} IN BIBLICAL HEBREW. By F. P. J. Snyman. Acta Academica Supplementum 3. Pp. vii + 315. Bloemfontein: UFS-SASOL Library, 2004. Paper. Snyman offers an exhaustive, computer-assisted study of the syntax (distribution ) and semantics (scope) of the Biblical Hebrew particle lo} ‘not’ to replace the “inadequate and incomplete” treatment thereof in existing grammars (p. 38). The study is a welcome contribution on this account. To describe adequately the “syntactic richness of this negative element” (p. 38), however, he invokes the full panoply of theoretical devices of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program, the dominant approach to generative grammar. As I suggest below, the full complexity of this theoretical framework is probably not required to analyze the syntactic phenomenon and may serve instead as a barrier to Hebraists together with the 300-page length. Because Snyman invokes the latest theorizing on explanatory adequacy within generative grammar (cognitive psychology), he is immediately embroiled in the difficulty of studying the tacit knowledge of native speakers of Biblical Hebrew. He suggests that “the adequacy of the description will be proportionate to the amount and variety of the material upon which it is based” (p. 2), and accordingly extends the scope of the study to the entire “huge corpus” of Biblical Hebrew, further invoking “the remarkable uniformity of the BH text” (p. 3). In terms of methodology, we might reasonably question this assumption of “uniformity.” On the one hand, the Biblical Hebrew corpus can readily be divided into five to ten sub-corpora by dialect markers (e.g., see V. DeCaen, Hebrew Studies 48 (2007) 363 Reviews “Hebrew Linguistics and Biblical Criticism: A Minimalist Programme.” Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 3 [2000–2001] and republished in Perspectives on Hebrew Scriptures, ed. E. Ben Zvi, 2006). On the other hand, we also know that the syntax of negation is especially liable to change; an obvious example is the history of negation in Modern English (see further, e.g., L. Horn, A Natural History of Negation [Stanford: CSLI, 2001]). The study is initially motivated with two examples of negation: Deut 7:7 and Exod 20:10. Snyman concludes that the possibility of reading the negation with wide or narrow scope “could lead to great confusion as to the exact meaning” (p. 6). In Deut 7:7, the adverbial phrase is negated (“not because ”), as the majority of translations confirm; the NIV and GNB suggest, however, that the negation has scope over the entire verse (“did not set, did not choose”). I would be prepared to argue that the wide-scope reading is not available. Similarly, the case of Exod 20:10 appears to be more an artifact of rendering into Germanic languages an awkward apposition under wide scope than a real example of a possible narrow-scope reading. However, there are other significant problems in the analysis of Biblical Hebrew negation that do merit the study that they receive in sections 5.8 and 6.5.2 (discussed below). Chapter 2, which is arguably two chapters in one, is a parade example of methodological rigour. In the first part, he describes in detail the morphological and prosodic variants of lo} to eliminate potential noise. He also flags twenty examples of qere/kethib but, curiously, fails to remove these from the database—as linguistic rigour dictates. In the second part, he offers an overview of previous treatments (both grammars and dictionaries), admittedly not exhaustive but a sufficient “basis as...