Suspense and Authority amid Biblical Hebrew Front Dislocation

What it is about

Front dislocation (casus pendens, left dislocation) is a noun, pronoun or participle phrase placed before a clause and taken up inside it by a resumptive element, whatever its role: subject ("the omer — a tenth of the ephah is it", Exod 16:36), object ("every matter which I command you — it you shall keep", Deut 13:1), possessor, or prepositional complement. Unlike plain topicalization, it has a resumptive. Beyond its known function of (re)activating a topic, Korchin argues from cognitive semiotics and Gernsbacher's structure-building framework that the construction delays the main predication and so creates suspense and asserts the speaker's authority. He surveys narrative, legal, oracular, lyrical and divine-speech contexts; the construction clusters in direct speech and proclamations. It can also be used ironically by characters without authority: Adam's "the woman whom you gave me — she gave me from the tree" (Gen 3:12). Prosody (a greater disjunctive accent, rising pitch) probably marked the dislocated phrase.

Ideas

I1. Detect front dislocation by its formal definition (initial substantival phrase + coreferent resumptive in the next clause) and, as a second cue, a disjunctive accent on the last word of the fronted phrase; count how often the two cues agree on the Torah trees.

For Mova

I2. Distribution test: share of dislocations in character speech vs narration (using prag's voice column), and in legal sections; the paper predicts a strong skew to speech and law.
I3. A prag feature: dislocation in a speaker's turn → mark the utterance as emphatic/authoritative (a hedge = 0, assertive register), and flag the Gen 3:12 type (dislocation used to shift blame) as a reading for the world's "who is responsible" relation.

I1 is a converter rule (UD dislocated) for tools/macula and a point for languages/hbo/08-syntax.md (dislocation) and 02-cantillation.md (accents as syntax). I2 is a count for 09-discourse.md. I3 is a candidate for tools/macula/src/prag.rs, measured with --with/--without. This card pairs with Westbury 2014 on the same construction.

Institutions

Also on the byline: Briar Cliff University.

Topics Hebrew & Aramaic Semitic languages

Cite

Cite as Paul Korchin. 2015. Suspense and Authority amid Biblical Hebrew Front Dislocation. Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 15.

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5508/jhs.2015.v15.a1

@article{korchin2015suspense,
  title = {{Suspense and Authority amid Biblical Hebrew Front Dislocation}},
  author = {Paul Korchin},
  journal = {Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 15},
  year = {2015},
  doi = {10.5508/jhs.2015.v15.a1},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5508/jhs.2015.v15.a1}
}

References

9 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

Andrason, A. 2011. The Biblical Hebrew Verbal System in Light of Grammaticalization: The Second Generation. Hebrew Studies 52:19–51. find
Baicchi, A. 2004. The Cataphoric Indexicality of Titles. Pp. 17– 38 in Discourse Patterns in Spoken and Written Corpora, eds. K. Aijmer and A. Stenström. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. find
Barrett, H. C. and R. Kurzban. 2006. Modularity in Cognition: Framing the Debate. Psychological Review 113/3:628–47. find
Berlin, A. 2008 [1985]. The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism. Revised and expanded edition. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans. find
Brewer, W. F. 1996. The Nature of Narrative Suspense and the Problem of Rereading. Pp. 107–27 in Suspense: Conceptualizations, Theoretical Analyses, and Empirical Explorations, eds. P. Vorderer, H. Wulff and M. Friedrichsen. Mahwah N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. find
Brockelmann, C. 1956. Hebräische Syntax. Neukirchen, Kreis Moers: Buchhandlung des Erziehungsvereins. find
Casielles-Suárez, E. 2003. Left-Dislocated Structures in Spanish. Hispania 86/2:326–38. find
Cecchetto, C. 1999. A Comparative Analysis of Left and Right Dislocation in Romance. Studia Linguistica 53/1:40–67. find
Chiarcos, C., B. Clause and M. Grabski. 2011. Salience in Linguistics and Beyond. Pp. 1–30 in Salience: Multidisciplinary Per- find

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📄 Suspense and Authority amid Biblical Hebrew Front Dislocation